Safeguarding Vulnerable Adults: Care Homes
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker, and thank you for being in the Chair for my first Adjournment debate, which concerns such an important matter.
The UK has a world-class national health service, full of the most fantastic doctors, nurses and support staff. It is a testament to our fantastic NHS that, for decades, we have generally seen life expectancy increase across the country. With increasing life expectancy, however, we have seen a growth in degenerative diseases such as dementia. For families living with a relative with dementia, it is an incredibly difficult experience to see a parent, for instance, lose the ability to talk and forget the essence of who they are. You never forget the first time that they look straight through you, having no idea who you are. I am sure that the Minister will extend her sympathies to the families across the country who live with those circumstances day in, day out.
Many families are increasingly reliant on extra care facilities and nursing homes to manage the healthcare needs of their elderly and vulnerable relatives. They will therefore experience the heart-wrenching feeling of visiting dozens of care facilities and wondering if their loved one will be happy and safe there—will the care be good enough? Sadly, my family and I have found out what happens when the answers to these questions is no. While the majority of those working in the care sector are wonderful and deserve medals for the incredible service they provide, there are, as in any industry, those who are not, and who, sadly, prey on the vulnerable.
I am going to now share something that is not at all easy to talk about. Minister, there are some phone calls you never wish to receive, and I can say that one of them is the hushed phone call from a carer who knows your family, who tells you that as a matter of urgency you need to come to the care facility and check on your loved one because they have been hurt. Nothing prepares you for arriving to find your loved one with black eyes, bruises, cuts and blood on their face. And I can tell you, Mr Speaker, that nothing prepares you for discovering that these injuries in fact happened three days previously and nobody called you, no one alerted you, nobody called an ambulance despite the fact that somebody had a head injury, was on blood thinners and is elderly, and with not a single person—not one—having any answers as to how this may have happened or any proof at all as to how this occurred.
My father has dementia. It started very young and affects a part of his brain that is involved with speech. He is fully aware of everything and even has memory, but his days as a university lecturer would be hard to imagine now were you to meet him, as not only does he not speak, but he can only sing in his mother tongue—which I have never heard him even speak in my lifetime. This makes him extremely vulnerable as he is unable to communicate with those who do not know him. As his children, however, my brother and I can understand his body language and his emotions; we know when he is happy, we know when he is sad, and unfortunately we now know what his demeanour is when he is deeply, deeply frightened.
He was found extremely distressed by a carer covered in bloody injuries which would have caused a great deal of blood loss wherever they had taken place. To our horror we were told that he had not left the building overnight, there was no evidence of him having fallen and no other resident had any evidence of injury. Quite unexpectedly, the centre manager suddenly left and not a single person had any excuse for what had happened or why we were not called. Three days—three days—it took for us to receive a phone call, which came in the manner of a hushed call from a carer who was leaving the very next day. She said she was entirely aware that we had not been told and deeply thought that we should know.
As any family would, we complained immediately to Wandsworth Council, which contracts out the care to London Care, which manages Ensham House, which is owned and run by Optivo. I am sad to say that there our nightmare began, and that nightmare is the reason for this debate, for if two young professionals can endure what happened in the following months in pursuit of answers I fear deeply for the elderly in our community, such as the 80-year-old woman who herself is frail, who is caring for her husband with dementia, and who is too fearful to speak out for fear of going through what I am about to describe.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this matter to the Chamber. She and I spoke about it last night, so I had a bit of an idea of what the issues were going to be. I commend her for bringing us her personal story and this exposé of what has happened to her family. Does she agree that the ability of former owners and management of care homes that have received bad ratings simply to operate elsewhere under a new name is not conducive to openness and transparency, and that consideration must be given to introducing further and better regulation of the staff, management and ownership of these homes, which house some of the most vulnerable people in the UK? Unfortunately, we have had similar circumstances in Northern Ireland, and they are heartbreaking for the families. I understand exactly what the hon. Lady is saying.
Dr Allin-Khan
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I entirely agree with him. This debate is about safeguarding all our vulnerable adults, including his constituents and all the people up and down the country who want and deserve the very best for their families.
Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making an incredibly powerful speech, and I congratulate her on securing this, her first, Adjournment debate. The experience that she is sharing with us speaks volumes as to why we need to make improvements to the way in which care homes are regulated, and particularly to the way in which the complaints and concerns of relatives are dealt with. This Minister for Care and her predecessors in the role will know that I have raised consistently the case of my constituent, Mr John Barrass, whose mother passed away in a care home in circumstances that have never, in his view, been satisfactorily explained. He has fought for eight years to get the answers that he requires. Does the hon. Lady agree that the points she is raising illustrate only too well the need to ensure that there is more transparency and clarity for relatives?
Dr Allin-Khan
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I am sorry that his constituent has had to live through that for eight years. I know how terribly difficult it has been to deal with such a situation for one year. His constituent is very lucky to have him raising this matter on his behalf again.
From the very first meeting with the safeguarding team at Wandsworth Council, my brother and I felt as though we were being put on trial. A new manager from Ensham House was present, but he had no idea about what had happened to my father, despite having been sent the horrific photos of his brutal injuries. The safeguarding team had not even looked at them. London Care had no answers as to why we were not called, and again had no answers as to how it could have happened. It was not until the wonderful police officer arrived, at my request, viewed the photos and showed visible alarm at the injury patterns that the Wandsworth Council staff actually took notice. I would like to extend my thanks to the fantastic police that we have in Wandsworth and up and down the country, who give of themselves day and night to ensure the safety of our community, even though they often stand up for people for whom they may never get answers.
It was agreed with Wandsworth Council’s safeguarding team that a police investigation would now commence, but it was explained to us that because Optivo housing association had not placed any CCTV cameras anywhere in Ensham House other than in the communal areas, and because my father could not communicate what had happened to him, it was very likely that we would not receive the answers we were looking for, and that a criminal conviction would be very difficult to obtain. As the police commenced their investigation, we expected the council to start conducting its own investigation, at the very least, because regardless of whether there had been criminal activity, questions needed answering. They were not answered, however.
In the following months, we found my father bruised again on two further occasions, with no explanation. He started to sleep in the communal area, for fear of being alone in his room. By this time, the Ensham House care staff knew that we were paying close attention because we were incredibly concerned, and that is when they started to attempt to claim that, despite a year of living there with no issues relating to him, my father was being difficult. The allegations were not corroborated by his community psychiatric team or any staff at the day centre where he spent up to 25 hours a week, and there had been no record of any issues prior to the first incident. Relatives of other residents started to tell us that staff had boasted that they were trying to get dad out because we were asking too many questions.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend not only on securing this debate, but on sharing her personal experience. By doing so, I hope that we will see some change. Where Wandsworth Council and other councils contract out care to private providers, does she agree that the right checks and balances must be in place to ensure that her father’s situation happens to no one else?
Dr Allin-Khan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that this is about scrutiny, but it is also about saying that a Care Quality Commission rating is not good enough, because vulnerable patients cannot articulate their needs, fill in forms or speak the truth accurately to a shiny inspection team when a care facility prepares for their arrival.
Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is brave to make a speech in the Chamber about her personal experiences. Does she agree that one of the most disconcerting things about what has happened to her family is to think about the impact on other families who are not as well informed or as articulate and who do not have a doctor or MP in the family? They will be vulnerable and distraught, but they will not have the opportunity to engage in the same way as my hon. Friend.
Dr Allin-Khan
It is for the very reasons that my hon. Friend so beautifully articulates that I am using this platform to raise this issue. This is no longer about my father; this is about every single member of our society—the veterans who fought in our wars, the older people who worked so hard for us to enjoy the liberty that we have today. I am speaking about this for our families, friends, neighbours, loved ones and the people to whom we owe our lives.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
I join colleagues from across the House in commending the hon. Lady for her incredibly brave speech. I am in awe of how she is articulating her case this evening. As a former co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dementia, I am conscious of the fact that we are at the start of a ticking dementia timebomb and that more and more people will fall victim to this cruel, horrible disease in the coming years, making them far more vulnerable in their communities than ever before. Does she agree that now is the time to ensure that the right safeguarding measures are in place, both for today and for the future?
Dr Allin-Khan
I thank the hon. Lady—I will call her my hon. Friend—who is tireless in fighting against loneliness and for people to have dignity in their communities, and she makes the most essential of points: we are at the start of a ticking timebomb.
While all this was going on, my father was admitted to hospital one afternoon for a routine issue. As we were undressing him, we found bruises all over his body. Did the Ensham House care staff phone to check on him? No. Did Optivo show any care? No. Instead, we were served an eviction notice, detailing a list of allegations against my father without any evidence. How heartless is it to receive an eviction notice while in hospital? What did Wandsworth Council do at this time? Nothing. What was London Care doing? In the space of just five months, London Care had five separate managers at Ensham House. This all started after the first incident with my father. One manager after another came and went, unfamiliar with my father’s safeguarding cases. Some were hostile, others made up incidents involving my father being difficult. Dementia is a degenerative illness, but it does not spiral downwards overnight. Prior to those incidents, as I previously mentioned, not a single issue regarding my father’s difficult behaviour had ever been reported.
In all meetings, it was agreed that the extra care setting was appropriate for my father as he still knew his way around the area, he had a level of independence and my very young daughters felt comfortable visiting him there. Why deny someone their last few months of independence? The extra care setting was deemed by the social services team and everyone involved to be entirely appropriate for him. However, each time we interacted with Ensham House care staff following the first incident in which we found my father beaten, and when we had not been called, we felt as though we were on trial, that we had somehow made up the fact that he was acting afraid, and our concerns were dismissed by a different manager every month.
We found multiple examples of my father’s medication not being written on the drug chart, with London Care saying that he had refused medication when we had seen him take it. We even found one manager had written a note in the staff communication book asking staff to write negative comments about my father in his care notes. The final nail in the coffin, and the point of no return, was when we found my father unconscious on the floor, with blood on the walls and the floor, and a carer’s set of keys left next to him. Following this, he spent one month in hospital.
Four months after that final event in October, there was nothing from Wandsworth Council addressing any of these concerns. The catalogue of disasters crescendoed last week, when the director of adult social services at Wandsworth Council, Liz Bruce—who had refused to look at photos of my father’s injuries, did not know how many open safeguarding complaints there were relating to my father, did not talk to anyone else who knew my dad and had never met him herself—declared that my father had sustained the injuries because “he had asked for it.” Despite police voicing their concerns in the meeting and saying that they cannot rule out abuse, despite her failure to investigate London Care fully and despite her clearly having no detailed knowledge of the case, she chose to use Optivo’s letter, which was full of unsubstantiated claims in the language of the Ensham House managers, as her proof. Well, I think we can all agree that this is a dangerous, highly unprofessional and highly unsatisfactory approach.
Of course it is easier to blame the patient and the family, anything other than looking inwards and accepting responsibility for the fact that the council is awarding care contracts to organisations that are, frankly, unsafe. Quoting CQC ratings in safeguarding communications, when it is well known that patients are fearful to talk, is frankly unacceptable. If this were happening to the UK’s children, the country would be in uproar, and rightly so. Someone living with dementia is just as dependent in their final years as children are in their first years.
Dr Allin-Khan
I am just finishing.
With an ageing population and an increase in degenerative illnesses, this issue will only get worse. As parliamentarians, we must act now to ensure that even more families do not experience the horror of finding their loved one bruised, bleeding and terrified. We owe it to the elderly in our community. We owe it to the vulnerable. We have to be their voice. They should not be deprived of their quality of life. We must give our vulnerable a fair chance at ageing safely and gracefully. Their voices must be heard.
Caroline Dinenage
That is a very interesting question. I have not considered the minimum staffing issue before. We are of course very concerned about training and ensuring that all care staff have a care certificate, so that there is a minimum level of skills training. However, the point about ratios is interesting, and I will take it into consideration.
I do not have a massive amount of time left, so I am not going to discuss in full the details of the individual case raised by the hon. Member for Tooting. However, I must reassure her that what she has raised today is something I take very seriously. My officials have informed me that her raising her concerns so effectively and our inquiries from our office as well have prompted Wandsworth Council to hold another meeting today to discuss her case and review the evidence. As a result, there will be an outcomes meeting—
Caroline Dinenage
It will be held for all parties to consider recommendations going forward and the hon. Lady will be able to attend. We look forward to hearing the outcome, and we will all be keeping a close eye on what transpires.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Steve Brine
Yes, they are still very much available. People should make an appointment through their GP or their wonderful pharmacist.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
While working a night shift in A&E this weekend, I was struck by the fact that I was working alongside so many members of staff from our EU—Italian, Irish and Spanish. I am proud that St George’s Hospital is paying for the visas of those vital staff post Brexit, but can the Secretary of State tell me why the financial burden of retaining them and improving their morale is falling on NHS trusts and not the Government?
Matt Hancock
I welcome what St George’s is doing, and I welcome all the people from the EU who are working in our NHS—in greater numbers than on the day of the referendum. They are welcome here, and I look forward to their working here long into the future.
NHS Winter Crisis
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Dr Whitford
If the hon. Gentleman gives me a little longer, he will find that I intend to talk about the flu epidemic, but before he gets too celebratory he might want to wait until tomorrow when we will have comparable data, because while in Scotland the data are published every week, in England they are published only every month. I am glad, however, that we no longer wait six weeks after the end of a month, which is 10 weeks after the start of it, but get it a fortnight later. So that will be available tomorrow, and then he can compare hospital trusts in England with hospitals in Scotland to his heart’s content. I would have thought that, as someone who celebrates the United Kingdom, he might want to praise the fact that Scotland has led the entire UK since March 2015 on emergency admissions and A&E.
Having corrected that, all of us recognise that this is a particularly tough winter because there has been an outbreak of flu on top of a bad freeze. I point out to those who think the worst is past that the flu season lasts until March and at the moment this is an outbreak, not an epidemic, but it comes on top of underlying pressures, and across the four nations this has involved staff having to go above and beyond the call of duty.
Whether it was how Public Health England said it or how the media reacted to it, this business of stating in public that the flu vaccination does not work is unfortunate and irresponsible. The flu vaccination recipe is planned by the World Health Organisation at the beginning of each year. It will already be working on next year’s flu. It does not have a crystal ball and people who have what we in the medical profession call a retrospectoscope should recognise that that tool was not available at the time when the decisions were made. Producing vaccine is a biological process that takes months, so the decision is made in March for the northern hemisphere, and all the companies produce to that recipe. Headlines in Scotland implying that the Scottish Government popped down to Boots and took the wrong vaccine off the shelf are therefore facile, and that also encourages people not to bother.
We already have falling vaccination rates in childhood vaccination and in flu. We should be pointing out that multiple flu viruses are circulating. While all the talk in the media is of Australian flu, in Scotland that is about a quarter of the strains that are circulating.
One of the issues with flu is that it happens in cold weather, and in Scotland we get the coldest weather in the United Kingdom, so we have double the rate of flu that there is down here in England. We also had a worse freeze, and are continuing to have a worse freeze. So when the data come out tomorrow, I think we will see that Scotland will still lead the UK. We will not be performing to the level we want. We have not met the 95% target for emergency departments since August, but England has not met them since 2015 and, sadly, Wales has not met them since 2008. So this is a challenge across the board, but Scotland has been more resilient. I call on all MPs to encourage staff and other people to get a flu vaccination, because this will continue until March and it is still absolutely worth doing.
The Secretary of State often talks as if the problems in A&E are due to people who should not be there. If we talk to anyone who works in A&E, they will say that, by and large, that is not the case. With people getting fractured ankles and fractured wrists on the ice, A&Es will have been very busy with having people carted in and X-rayed, and what we call in Scotland getting a stookie put on before they go home. That is all going to take time, but anyone who works in A&E would say that the key issue is frail, sick people, often with multiple conditions, and whether they fractured their hip falling on the ice or have a respiratory problem secondary to flu, they need a bed and the issue in England is that there are not enough beds.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
I work in A&E and spent some shifts in recess working in A&E—on new year’s eve and just a few days ago, on Sunday. I agree that many of the people attending A&E, particularly at St George’s where I work, are there because they are frail, but they are also there because this Government have ensured they cannot get an appointment with their GP, our social care is in crisis and we do not have mental health budgets.
Dr Whitford
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention.
Obviously, the shape of medicine has changed. More is delivered in primary care—as a surgeon, I well know that more surgeries are delivered in a day—but if we are doing a straightforward operation on an older patient, they will still always require longer rehabilitation; they are more likely to stay overnight or several days, and if they have fractured their hip, they will require full rehabilitation before they go home. The problem is that the number of beds in England has been halved since 1987—under successive Governments—and the NHS stats released for the end of the second quarter of 2017-18 show that almost 1,000 beds have been lost even since the winter of last year, when the situation was described as a humanitarian crisis. That was a mild winter that did not have a flu outbreak on top.
England has only 2.4 beds per 1,000 population, whereas the EU15 that the Secretary of State refers to has 3.7, and we in Scotland have more than four. If we are running constantly with bed occupancy rates of over 85% or 90%, that is where the issue lies.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
It is interesting to follow the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson). I have to say respectfully that I wholeheartedly disagree with her. She speaks of some kind of NHS utopia, but that is not the reality that I have seen on our A&E frontline. I am an A&E specialist and I have worked in our NHS for the past 12 years.
When we look around an A&E department, everything is on display in high definition: people’s pain, fears, courage and hopes; the unfailing dedication, expertise and strength of the staff who work there; and yes, the state of the NHS, which is in turmoil. It is in crisis, which is turning into disaster. From hospitals across the country, we have heard that the problem is not a surface or temporary issue.
The symptoms of the NHS crisis are all connected and multiply into new problems. That is not seen in statistics alone, but it is seen in A&E departments, which are completely overcrowded. People feel forced to come to A&E who should not be there: people who could not get a GP appointment or who had to wait too long for a hip replacement and are now in severe pain. Taken together with the emergency cases—from heart attacks and strokes to road traffic accidents—it is simply too much for the resources that we have.
The reality is stark. Cubicles are full because there is no space to move patients on to wards. The wards are full because our social care system is woefully inadequate and broken. When all beds are full, we see ambulances queuing up outside hospitals. They are full of patients who cannot get hospital care. What do we say to a mother or a father who is in an ambulance with their child, scared and anxious, and has to wait outside the hospital for another hour?
Doctors are too stretched to do the job we are trained to do. We are the recipients of first-class education and training in the UK and we cannot deliver the very thing that we know to be right: to treat the cause, not just the symptoms. There is little time for prevention.
On new year’s eve, when I worked in A&E, we had a teenage girl who fainted. We treated her and spent time talking to her, but we pride ourselves on being able to find root causes: is there an underlying eating disorder or is she being bullied at home or at school? To have those conversations, we need to build trust, which takes time. If we do not do that, the patient is more likely to return, sometimes in pain because their operation has been cancelled. A teenager who faints at school might need to be part of child and adolescent mental health services. That all places a burden on our already stretched NHS. It will not change until this Government decide to live up to their most sacred duty: the protection of the health and security of us all. The NHS is underfunded and overwhelmed.
Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that desperate patients should never have to resort to smuggling out secretly filmed footage of trolley-lined corridors with people sitting on the floors, such as the footage I have received from my constituents visiting and working at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford?
Dr Allin-Khan
I agree that it is deplorable that patients should feel that they have to do that. The historic underfunding of the NHS is not an economic necessity; it is a political choice made by this Government, which is why they will not change their direction to protect us.
So, what must we do? We must change the Government. Until we do, the NHS will continue to crumble around its heroic staff, who will carry on giving their all; I am honoured to stand alongside them. We see their work not in the headlines, but in the most harrowing, important and joyful moments of people’s lives. As NHS practitioners, we cannot always change the outcome; but with time and resources, we can change the journey. It is time that we saw a change in our A&Es, our hospitals and our Department of Health.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Mr Hunt
I think I have said to my hon. Friend in the House, and I have certainly said to my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles)—who I am delighted to see back in the Chamber after an incredibly brave battle against cancer—that this was a temporary closure based on difficulties in recruiting doctors, so I will certainly look into the issue very carefully.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
Last winter, patients were languishing on trolleys in A&E for up to 12 hours. The Red Cross was called in, and people were leaving A&E before their treatment. Does the Secretary of State recognise that it would be absolutely unacceptable for that to happen again this winter? What steps is he taking to ensure that it will not?
Mr Hunt
With respect, the Red Cross was not called in. As the hon. Lady well knows—as a doctor working at Tooting hospital—NHS trusts contract with the Red Cross throughout the year. However, she is right to say that what happened last year was not acceptable. We have done a huge amount: perhaps most important is our provision of an extra £1 billion for this year’s social care budget and a further £1 billion for next year’s budget, because that is where particular pressures were, but we have also allocated £100 million to a capital fund to help A&E departments to improve their facilities.
Health
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
There is a crisis in mental health staffing levels. Does the Secretary of State accept that today, throughout the country, there are 2,000 fewer mental health nurses than there were when he took charge five years ago?
Oral Answers to Questions
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Steve Brine
At the last health oral questions, I committed to publishing the new tobacco control plan. I did that on 18 July. We have had a lot of legislation, from this and the previous Government. It is Stoptober, and there has never been a better time to quit. We now need to take that legislation, work with the control plan the Government have published and work it through local authorities and smoking cessation services, because my hon. Friend is absolutely right that where buddying services are used, we have better outcomes.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
There is a crisis in mental health staffing levels. Does the Secretary of State accept that today, throughout the country, there are 2,000 fewer mental health nurses than there were when he took charge five years ago?
Mr Hunt
What I accept is that we have 30,000 more professionals working in mental health than when my Government came into office. There has been a decline in the number of mental health nurses, but we have in place plans to train 8,000 more mental health nurses, and that will make a big difference.[Official Report, 17 October 2017, Vol. 629, c. 6MC.]
NHS Pay
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
I must take the time to declare an interest: I am a junior doctor at St George’s hospital in Tooting.
When the Conservative Government began their programme of ideological austerity, they imposed the pay cap to secure our nation’s finances. It quite simply has not worked. We were told that the Government could not increase public sector pay beyond 1% because to do so would harm our financial security, but capping public sector pay has harmed us. It has put stress fractures in the foundations of our society—our public services. After seven years of austerity, this Government have borrowed more than all other Labour Governments in history combined. The Government have not paid off the budget deficit, and they lack any credible economic direction. Instead, they are attempting to drive our economy off the Brexit cliff like a lemming.
A decade on from a global financial crisis and seven years after the Government’s austerity programme began, our nurses, refuse collectors and teaching assistants are still paying the price. The stability of our society—the foundation on which we live our lives—depends on these vital services, from healthcare to our security, our children’s education and our local government. Since 2010, our nurses have suffered a real-terms pay cut of 14%. A hospital porter is £7,000 worse off, and a midwife has been left £18,000 short. These real-terms pay cuts have hit so hard that some of those who choose to stay in the profession are forced to use food banks, take on a second job and rack up personal debt, all because public sector pay rises have consistently failed to keep up with the rising cost of living.
The bravery of our emergency service personnel has been highlighted in recent months, following some truly tragic events, but when the media spotlight goes away they perform the very same duties, at the same risk and with the same courage. The Government absolutely do not value the people who put their lives on the line every single day to save ours.
Anna Soubry
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, but I think she should take back what she has just said. Whatever divides us when it comes to pay and financing, the one thing that cannot be said about any hon. or right hon. Member of this House, whichever party they may support, is that they do not care about the workers in the NHS. We certainly do, and we value and respect them.
Dr Allin-Khan
I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention, but I have to say that a future Labour Government will not just talk the talk; we will walk the walk. A Labour Government will be on the side of ordinary people—those serving on Britain’s frontline. It is not right that in 2017 Britain, those at the top of our civil service can receive golden handshakes, taking home more than a quarter of a million pounds a year, while those on the frontline are stuck on the breadline.
Fiona Onasanya (Peterborough) (Lab)
In response to the comments from the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), does my hon. Friend agree that instead of just saying that we respect our public sector workers, we want to show them that respect? The cap has affected morale and retention. To say otherwise, when we can see that what is being done is harming people, is to be much like the people in the story of the emperor’s new clothes who said to the emperor, “You are not naked.”
Dr Allin-Khan
I agree 100% with my hon. Friend’s argument, which was most eloquently put. While those on the frontline work so hard, they are on the breadline. Our firefighters, teaching assistants, council officers, nurses, policemen and women, prison guards and hospital porters—the list is endless—are the glue that binds our country together. The services in which they work are vital, because they allow people in every part of the country to live their lives, feel safe and have opportunity. Those workers—I have the pleasure of working alongside many of them at St George’s hospital in Tooting—do not seek recognition; they serve our country selflessly on a daily basis. They are simply seeking a decent day’s pay for a decent, hard day’s work. That is why the Labour party would scrap the NHS pay cap and give our hard-working NHS staff pay that recognises the skill and dedication that they bring to their working lives.
Dr Allin-Khan
No, I am going to make some progress.
The quality of NHS services depends on the skill and talent of the people in them. Those in our NHS facing the everyday challenge of treating our most vulnerable should not be worrying about how they will put food on the table for their children—the very children who are having to accompany them to food banks.
Let us be clear: lifting the pay cap is not about recognition. It is about removing a cap that actively degrades our public services, weakening the foundations under our feet. Let us stop this demonisation of a workforce who hold this country together. We need an independent pay body to negotiate public service pay. Our services have been gutted by seven years of ideological austerity.
Simon Hoare
I will let you work out whether it is an interesting intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I am listening carefully to what the hon. Lady says. She speaks with passion and from chalk-face experience. I was interested to hear her make an open-ended pledge that her party would raise public sector pay in the national health service, but she has not said by how much, at what rate, on what timetable or how it would be funded. Can we have some detail?
Dr Allin-Khan
The hon. Gentleman heard the eloquent contribution from the Opposition spokesman today, and I would ask him where the £350 million a week is that we expected to see as a result of leaving the European Union. If his party has its way, we will have even less money for the NHS, so we will not only lose our valuable workforce who have come here from Europe but we will be further underfunded.
Lifting the public service pay cap would enhance the capacity and skill of each of our public services. In such high-pressure, stressful places of work, we demand that our nurses, police officers and firefighters make life or death decisions with a clear mind. How will they do that if, at the back of their mind they are worrying about how they will be able to feed their children or care for their parents? They will burn out—it is a recipe for disaster, and we are already seeing it happen. How long do we expect those public sector workers to carry on like that?
There are times when we in the House divide and times when we unite. This debate reaches far beyond a percentage increase on a payslip. It is about not just pay but the knock-on effect on lives. I implore the Government to look at the issue again and pay our public service heroes a decent wage.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Hunt
I heard a lot about Stepping Hill when I went to visit my hon. Friend; I think it was last year. I had the privilege of visiting the hospital more recently after the horrific terrorist attacks, and I commend the hospital for the brilliant work that it did in the wake of the bomb. The hospital has done a good job of recruiting; I think it has recruited 93 more doctors and nearly 300 more nurses since 2010. A national programme to help all trusts to retain their nursing staff has been launched by NHS Improvement in the last week.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
In this country, we are short of approximately 40,000 nurses, and applications for nursing places have gone down by 23%. Can the Secretary of State tell us why he and his Government think that that is the case?
Mr Hunt
The hon. Lady happens to work in an NHS hospital in which there has been a big increase in the number of nurses. Across the country, there are actually 13,000 more nurses working on our wards than there were in 2010, but she is right: we need more nurses and nursing staff, and that is why we are expanding the number of nurse associates. This year we are, for the first time, opening up an apprenticeship route into nursing, which means that people from non-traditional backgrounds—particularly band 3 healthcare assistants—will find it much easier to get into nursing. That is how we will expand the workforce.
NHS Shared Business Services
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Mr Hunt
The company has been stripped of that contract; it was relieved of the contract back in 2015. We are very clear that it will have to fulfil all its contractual requirements, including paying its fair share of the costs that have been incurred as a result of this wholly regrettable incident.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
Patient confidentiality and safety must be treated with the utmost seriousness at all times, and the NHS fails if it loses the trust of its patients, so how did the Secretary of State for Health come to the conclusion that risk to more than 1,700 patients was merely due to an issue of mail redistribution?
Mr Hunt
I did not come to that conclusion. The hon. Lady is right, as a doctor, to say that patients’ trust in the way we hold their records is very important. In this case, the correspondence concerning patients was not forwarded, but it was not lost either. It was held securely, so no patient data were put at risk, but it should have been forwarded to another part of the NHS, and it was not; it was effectively stockpiled. That is what caused the concerns. We have been going through the high-priority cases. So far, the vast majority of cases have had two clinical reviews, and the ones we are still concerned about are having a third clinical review. We are taking this extremely seriously.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts(7 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Hunt
The hon. Lady needs to be very careful in her use of statistics, because she will know that one reason for the drop in the number of nurses coming from the EU is that prior to the Brexit vote we introduced much stricter language tests, as that is better for the safety of patients and a very important thing that we need to get right. We are very confident that nurses will continue to want to work in the NHS, because it is a great place to work.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
Between February 2016 and January 2017, there were just under 3,500 waits of longer than 12 hours from decision to admit to admission. That is completely unacceptable, which is why the Government took urgent steps to free up NHS bed capacity in this month’s Budget.
Dr Allin-Khan
Earlier this month, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners said that the “best place for GPs” is working within their communities to provide the highest possible general practice quality. What forecast has the Secretary of State made of the reduction in A&E waiting times next winter as a result of the new GP triage units in A&E departments? Does he agree that this is simply a small sticking plaster on the gaping wound that is our drastically underfunded NHS?