(3 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Fixing and getting our NHS back on its feet should be a national mission, and everybody should be able to play their part in that. Will the Secretary of State confirm whether any former Conservative Ministers have put themselves forward to try to fix the mess that the party now in opposition created over the last 14 years?
This is the extraordinary thing: notwithstanding the public job application of a former Conservative Secretary of State, which did not meet the bar, I have been approached by former Ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care who served in the Conservative Government who, in a spirit of public service, have wanted either to do work for the Labour Government on issues that they care about, or have sought to share their experiences—the highs or, indeed, the many lows—of being in government. That is a totally legitimate thing to do. I suspect that, if I rang round all my Labour predecessors, I would find that the Conservative Government tried desperately hard to get them to work for them, because, as I say, the challenge for Conservative Health Secretaries was that they did not have any successful Conservative predecessors to turn to.
(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberI thank the right hon. Lady because she again makes for us the excellent point about what has happened in the last 14 years under her Government: these situations have been allowed to get so much worse both in Essex and across the country. She should also welcome our mission to rebuild the broken front door to the NHS and have more neighbourhood services based in communities, bringing those services together where patients are; that is absolutely what we all want and I am very happy to discuss this with her.
For 14 years the community in Telford and I have worked hard to safeguard our A&E, but the last Conservative Government made Telford the largest town without a fully functioning A&E. Will the Health team meet me and other Shropshire MPs to discuss this discredited and disgraceful decision?
I welcome my hon. Friend to his place. He knows what we all know, and what we know the entire country knows because we spent the past six weeks campaigning: it is the same story across the country. That is why we are committed to restoring standards and why we will fix this broken NHS, and of course I am happy to meet with him.