NHS: North-West London

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Good news for a change from this Government, who have admitted that the crackpot “Shaping a healthier future” plan to cut the nine major hospitals in north-west London to five is not workable and has been killed off. It was always a David and Goliath battle.

I pay tribute to, on the one side, Ealing Save our NHS, which works shoulder to shoulder with Save our Hospitals Charing Cross and our two Labour councils, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) mentioned. They are people like Ollie, Eve, Arthur and Judy Breens, Aysha, Raj and Gill, who held protests and popped up at every carnival. They organised parties, lobbies and petitions, and distributed a quarter of a million leaflets, all of which were paid for out of rattling buckets and their own pockets.

On the other side, we had “Shaping a healthier future”, with its swanky offices in upmarket Marylebone. Tens of millions of pounds of NHS cash from the public purse was spent on private management consultants, who all mysteriously alleged that if they junked departments, A&Es and hundreds of beds, health outcomes would somehow improve. In the end, the figures did not work. Quelle surprise! They never worked.

As early as 2012, John Lister pointed out in his report that the whole thing was a pile of nonsense, as did reports from the two councils, which involved the forensic skills of Sir Michael Mansfield, QC. Even then, seven years into a five-year-long failing plan, local health bosses were still carrying on as if the emperor were fully clothed. There was a heavy-handed threat of legal action against me, because my 2017 general election leaflets pointed out that it did not work. That arrived days after my mother passed away at Ealing Hospital—I know every bit of the hospital, right down to the morgue.

Where next? These disastrous Frankenstein plans have seen the two A&Es nearest to Acton Central—Middlesex and Hammersmith—completely shut their doors. I congratulate the Minister on her appointment, and my question to her is: can we have them back, as well as the stroke unit, paediatrics, maternity services and A&E admissions for children at Ealing? All these things mean that the figures for type 1 A&E urgent visits are going through the roof. No more babies are to be born at Ealing. As a mum, I recently had to schlep out of the borough for a paediatric appointment at the West Middlesex Hospital, which is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury).

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith said, we need a serious exercise in lessons learned from this whole sorry episode, rather than clinging on to defend the indefensible and denying that there are serious problems. Ealing Hospital remains perilously underfunded and in crisis. Staff morale has been sapped, as was pointed out, by all the uncertainty. We could go on and on about the Brexit effects—the EU nurses exiting in droves and the social care sector being hollowed out by this Government, who are obsessed with their £30,000 skills target.

The slaying of the beast that was “Shaping a healthier future,” which was always known locally as “Shafting a healthier future,” is not before time and has raised eyebrows, such is the cynicism of politics in our time. As we did at the Drayton Court Hotel in my constituency last week, let us eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow there might be another election.