Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

16. What steps he is taking to raise the quality of leadership and management across the health and social care sectors.

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Sajid Javid)]

In health and care, strong leadership can make the difference between life and death. I have been clear that we can accept only the highest possible standards and that in some cases poor leadership has been tolerated for too long. That is why I have accepted in full the recommendations of General Sir Gordon Messenger’s independent review and will set out a delivery plan to begin what I think will be the biggest shake-up in health and social care leadership in a generation.

Health and Social Care Leadership Review

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

That is exactly why I have commissioned a 15-year workforce strategy from the NHS.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and congratulate him on the work he has been doing in this important area. Does he agree that for too long there has been a culture of a lack of accountability among NHS senior management, and too often a blame culture, where things go wrong but are not transparently acknowledged? Does he agree how awful that is for the patients concerned? Will he do everything possible to ensure that we tackle the blame culture and the lack of accountability to the public, who the NHS is there to serve?

[Sajid Javid]

I agree very much with my hon. Friend. She will know from her own NHS trust, particularly the maternity problems there and the terrible cases set out in the Donna Ockenden report, just where that kind of culture can lead. Of course there are fantastic examples day in, day out of great culture and great leadership in the NHS, but there are also poor outcomes. She is absolutely right that we need to tackle those. That is exactly what is in this report.

Ockenden Report

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. I assure her that constituents throughout Shropshire, Telford and the Wrekin, and indeed families across England, will be safer as a result of those brave families coming forward and this report.

On resources, the hon. Lady will have heard me talk about the £95 million given at the time of the interim report, plus the £127 million given for maternity services in the past few days. We will keep that under review.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his very welcome statement and the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), for her excellent work. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) for everything that he has done for patient safety; he has led the way, and I am so grateful.

Does the Secretary of State believe that what we have seen at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is indicative of a culture in which senior management were unaccountable, no one felt responsible, failings were minimised, poor care was normalised and women’s voices were not heard? Will he do everything he can to increase the accountability of senior management across the NHS so that that institutional blindness can never again cause such harm to those who put their trust in the NHS?

[Sajid Javid]

Let me first thank my hon. Friend for her approach and her role in helping to make the report happen, and for the way in which she has worked with me, and with Ministers in my Department, on this most important of issues. She is right to talk about the importance of culture, especially given that, as the report makes clear, the voices of women were not heard time and again. I want to reassure her that we will implement all the report’s recommendations, but, more broadly, that women’s voices will be at the heart of the upcoming women’s health strategy.

Elective Treatment

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I am surprised with the argument and the tone of the hon. Gentleman. It is 2022, not 2024. We have all come to expect the scaremongering that we have just heard from the Labour Benches at election time—that has happened in every election campaign since the war—but what I did not expect is this scaremongering from the hon. Gentleman on the plans to recover in the wake of a deadly pandemic.

I am astonished and disappointed that the hon. Gentleman is willing to stand there and claim that there is no covid backlog. [Interruption.] That is what he just said. He just said that there is no covid backlog. He is well aware that this country has just gone through its biggest health challenge in history. He is also well aware that there has been a national mission across the NHS to deal with that challenge and to recover from it. I paid tribute to the hon. Gentleman just last week in this House—perhaps I was just a bit too early—when he rightly supported the nation’s vaccination programme, because he understood just how important it was. Perhaps some of his Back Benchers have now got to him, so instead of standing up for the British people, he is just thinking about his own leadership prospects in his party—perhaps that is what is actually going on.

Today, instead of doing the right thing and backing the NHS—backing the hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and everyone working heroically across the NHS—the hon. Gentleman decided to play party politics. A moment ago, he heard me talk about the 10 million people who the NHS estimates have stayed away from the NHS and who need reassurance from both sides of the House about what the NHS is doing. He should reconsider his approach and work together in the national interest.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I welcome the statement and I am grateful to the Secretary of State for setting out a covid recovery plan to tackle the challenges that lie ahead. Every single Member of the House should support him in that endeavour. I ask him, however, how he will tackle the staffing crisis.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my hon. Friend for her support. Over the past two years, the number of clinicians in the NHS has risen by about 40,000. In the past year, we have 10,000 more nurses, 5,000 more doctors and more people in medical school than ever before, so a huge amount of record investment is going into the workforce. Recently, I also asked the NHS to put together a long-term 10-year-plus workforce strategy and I look forward to receiving it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise this issue, and I thank him for his comments at the start. We all know, as we have just heard from the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), that the NHS in particular and social care have been under huge pressure; I think it has been the most challenging time in their history. Everyone has performed in a way that we can all be proud of. Despite that, we have seen a huge rise in electives, and I think that the number will go higher before it goes lower, because so many people stayed away when they were asked to. I want them to come forward. I want them to know that the NHS is open for them. We will support it with a bigger workforce and more investment, including the £36 billion of extra investment from the new NHS and social care levy.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

T4. Delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment have had tragic consequences for some of my constituents. What is my right hon. Friend doing to improve cancer survival rates?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend raises an issue that is very close to my heart, and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) rightly raised it a moment ago, too. The pandemic has exposed huge health disparities in this country. It is clear to me that we need to go much further on cancer, not only to catch up on cancer referrals, diagnosis and treatment and radical innovation, but to improve the persistently poor outcomes that patients in this country have long experienced compared to those in other countries. It is time we launched a war on cancer. I am working on a new vision to radically improve the outcome for cancer patients across the United Kingdom, and I will have more to say on that in due course.

Covid-19 Update

Debate between Sajid Javid and Lucy Allan

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady first talked about the importance of border control, and she was right to do so. That is why the Government have already put in place the so-called traffic light system, with this Department working across Government with the Home Office, Border Force, the Department for Transport and others. The system absolutely needs to be kept under review to ensure that it is doing its job in protecting the people of this country from viruses, and especially from any new variants of covid-19 that may emerge. I can give her reassurance on that.

The hon. Lady also raised Test and Trace. She should know that the NHS Test and Trace system is the largest diagnostic exercise of its kind in British history. We have carried out more than 200 million tests, identified more than 4 million positive cases and found more than 7 million of their contacts. Every time that happens, whether in England, Scotland or any part of the United Kingdom, that breaks the chain of transmission and saves lives.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

May I say how delighted I am to see my right hon. Friend back on the Front Bench? I congratulate him on his appointment to this crucial role, and I welcome his approach, as set out in his statement. He will be an excellent Health Secretary.

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that 19 July will mark the end of the road map out of lockdown, that “terminus” means the end of the line, not an interchange, and that it is his intention that all restrictions will be lifted on that date?

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my hon. Friend for her kind remarks. As she will have heard in my statement, it is absolutely our intention to have step 4 commence on 19 July and to remove restrictions and start returning to normal. She asked me specifically about all restrictions, or which restrictions. It is certainly our intention to remove restrictions, but as we follow the data in the coming days, we will set out more in due course.