NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans

Debate between Rupa Huq and Emma Lewell-Buck

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

We have all become accustomed to the Conservative party’s disdain for our NHS since the shambles of the top-down reorganisation that began in 2012. Now we have the stealth introduction of sustainability and transformation plans—secret plans that would bring yet more unjustifiable and drastic reforms to cash-starved hospitals. Instead of being given the funding they so desperately need, hospitals are being asked to make £22 billion of efficiencies to compensate for this Government’s total mismanagement of our NHS. The audacity of making hospitals themselves pay the price for that by threatening them with closure or the reduction of acute services is the final act of treachery in a tragic and deliberate play to decimate our NHS.

South Shields is part of the footprint area of Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, an arbitrarily created boundary. By 2021, the health and social care system in that footprint area is projected to be £960 million short of the funds it needs to balance its books while maintaining the same level of care for patients. Make no mistake: these plans are about cuts. They are nothing to do with transforming our NHS for the better. The NHS has been set an impossible task by the Government; the endgame is to see it in private hands.

The Government have said that the initial STP submissions to NHS England are

“for local use, and there are no plans to publish them centrally”—

a nice touch to put the onus once on to our hospitals again, so that the Government themselves do not have to deal with the flak.

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

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I would rather not, because a lot of people are waiting to speak.

I was born in South Tyneside hospital. I am the local MP for the area, and I have not seen a single plan—not even the governors at my local hospital have, let alone the people of Shields, whose vital acute and emergency services could be devastated by these changes.

I am told that the timetable for implementing these unseen plans begins this autumn, yet the first we will see of them in my area is at the end of this month—that is, in the autumn. I am extremely alarmed at the lack of accountability and transparency with which the plans are being pushed through. There is simply no time at all for consultation. I make a plea to all NHS leaders not to be complicit but to stand up for their hospitals and the communities that they serve. The Government have no mandate for such a radical reconfiguration of our NHS, one that could involve the closure of accident and emergency and acute services up and down the country.

Last week, the Prime Minister called in NHS leaders to order them to stop any hospital mergers or closures that risk causing local protests. There is already a protest in my constituency.