National Health Service Funding

Simon Burns Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way in a moment. The former Education Secretary needs to calm down, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Public health budgets, which fund projects to tackle teenage pregnancy, excessive alcohol consumption, sexually transmitted infections and substance misuse and to provide anti-smoking interventions, will have been cut by 9.7% by the end of this Parliament. That is a completely false economy leading to greater demands on the acute sector. As my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) so brilliantly outlined last week, the adult social care budget has been slashed.

[Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman.

[Sir Simon Burns]

I am so grateful to the hon. Gentleman. The House would take him somewhat more seriously if he pointed out that, by 2019-20, the real-terms increase in spending on the health service will be £10 billion. During the last election, his party promised to increase spending in this Parliament by only a quarter of that— £2.5 billion.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The right hon. Gentleman was the Minister who took the Health and Social Care Act 2012 through this Parliament, and who wasted £3 billion on an unnecessary top-down reorganisation. He should be apologising to the House, not making those comments.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

No, I want to make a bit of progress.

We are seeing unprecedented cuts to social care, which means that the number of people aged over 65 accessing publicly funded social care will fall by 26%. UK public spending on social care is set to fall to less than 1% of GDP by the end of this Parliament.

Just yesterday, Baroness Altmann, the former Conservative pensions Minister who was appointed last year to great fanfare by David Cameron, said that we are “sleepwalking into a crisis” and that the NHS will not be able to pick up the pieces of a “broken system”.

[Sir Simon Burns]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I have given way to the right hon. Gentleman. [Interruption.] He can check Hansard tomorrow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Simon Burns]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that without that investment since 2009-10 to last year there would not have been the 1.6 million more operations within the NHS that benefit all our constituents?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend is right. I congratulate him, because he was part of the shadow Health team that persuaded the then shadow Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition that we needed to make that investment, thanks to which the NHS is doing 5,000 more operations every single day.