Easter Adjournment

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Thursday 10th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Last month I had an Adjournment debate about the ongoing threat to the future of my local general hospital, St Helier. A huge banner covering the front of the hospital that said, “Coming soon—We’re spending £219 million on a major development of St Helier hospital”, had just been taken down. The £219 million had been on the table since early 2010, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) announced that the 1930s-built hospital would be completely renovated, with new wards, single rooms to cut down on infections, and improved patient privacy, as well as numerous other improvements to bring it into the 21st century. Initially, the scheme was backed by the coalition, but it was not long before St Helier’s future was put at risk.

In 2011, the local NHS said that the Government had told it to

“deliver £370m savings each year…around 24% in their costs.”

A new body called Better Services Better Value was set up to close accident and emergency and maternity units across south-west London and Surrey. Predictably, BSBV recommended that St Helier should be one of the losers and that we should also lose our intensive care unit, paediatric centre, renal unit, and 390 in-patient beds. But thankfully, post-Lewisham, the local Save St Helier campaigners fought off the worst of these plans, largely thanks to the backing of doctors in Surrey, where Epsom hospital was also threatened. Two weeks ago, I handed in a petition to save St Helier that had been signed by more than 13,000 of my constituents. I was proud to stand alongside campaigners like Sally Kenny, who set up the Lower Morden Save St Helier campaign; Mary Curtin, who for many years has run the local lunch club, Friends in St Helier; Stan Anderson, a Lower Morden resident and local councillor who has fought tirelessly to keep St Helier open; and Stephen Alambritis, the leader of Merton council, who has done all he can to help. Thanks to them and all the other Save St Helier campaigners, BSBV has been wound down and the immediate plans to close services at St Helier have been shelved.

However, the threat still hangs over us. The reason I am here to speak about this again is that since last month there have been further developments. First, the local NHS has voted to bring in a new strategic commissioning group that will be led by one of the people at the forefront of the plans to shut services at St Helier, Dr Howard Freeman, who is also the chair of Merton’s clinical commissioning group. Many of us are concerned that St Helier will now see the level of services that had been commissioned from it decrease, which would seriously undermine the viability of our hospital. That is consistent with a letter from NHS England which says that not going ahead with the closure of services at St Helier and Epsom hospitals

“carries significant and unacceptable risk, both financially and clinically”

and calls for “a coherent strategic plan”. Interestingly, it also points out the obvious—that people will interpret this approach as

“planning for clinical and financial failure in some of its providers.”

That is true. We are all worried that NHS England will deliberately plan for hospitals such as St Helier and Epsom to fail. Without the £219 million renovation, and without getting the full range of services commissioned from the local CCGs, they will not be allowed to become foundation trusts. They will wither, and the forces lined up against St Helier will get the outcome they originally wanted—the closure of A and E, maternity, and numerous other services. It might not happen straight away, but slowly and surely, perhaps within two or three years, we will find that we no longer have the hospital we now enjoy.

It makes matters worse that in the past month we have seen the spectacle of local Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs voting for clause 119 of the Care Bill. Everyone who supports the Save St Helier campaign is furious about that. Whatever the merits or otherwise of clause 119, campaigners believe it is nothing more than an attempt to thwart campaigns like theirs as revenge for the success of campaigners in Lewisham and a way of closing hospitals that are well run and have wide support. Last week, Merton council passed a motion condemning the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) for betraying Merton residents when he voted for clause 119. Since then, the leader of Merton Conservatives, Councillor Oonagh Moulton, has angered campaigners even more by proclaiming in the local Wimbledon Guardian:

“St Helier Hospital has been saved”.

Given the track record of people like Dr Freeman, I do hope those words do not come back to haunt her.

The immediate threat may have been fought off, but just as secret plans were drawn up to close St Helier back in 1996, I am sure that its enemies are planning for it to fail even as we speak. I do not believe that this Government are committed to St Helier. The £219 million was withdrawn; the strategic commissioning body has been set up; clause 119 has been passed; savings have to be made; and the local NHS has been making plans to fail. Slowly but surely, St Helier is being strangled. Our best hopes lie with campaigners like Sally, Mary, Stan, and Merton’s councillors. We need to win, because if St Helier loses its A and E, 200,000 people will face longer journeys in an emergency, neighbouring A and Es will struggle with the extra workload, and millions will suffer.

I ask the Minister to say today that he agrees with the Save St Helier campaign, that he will instruct our local NHS to spend the £219 million, that it must not reduce the work it commissions from St Helier, and that it must respect the people of Lower Morden and St Helier who depend on our hospital.

I would like to raise some other NHS concerns. In the transfer from primary care trusts to CCGs to NHS England, two schemes to provide new GP surgeries in my constituency have stalled. First, there is Colliers Wood and Lavender Fields surgery, a GP practice based on two sites that are more than 1 mile apart and in desperate need of updating. The practice has found it very difficult to find alternative accommodation in such a built-up urban area. A couple of years ago, it identified a site on the first floor above the local library—a building owned by a company called Crown Properties. A price was negotiated, heads of terms were agreed, and a lot of the preparation work began. The local pharmacist had already moved into a building nearby in preparation for the new surgery. However, it now transpires that somewhere in the transfer from PCTs to CCGs to NHS England, the project fell off the radar. In the meantime, Crown Properties has gone into receivership, and its receivers, Knight Frank, are backing away from the deal. They have applied for a change of use that would turn the offices into flats rather than a GP surgery, thereby jeopardising the prospect of the surgery moving. I would welcome the assistance of the Minister to find out where the scheme is and to help me secure a meeting with the receivers to discuss how much this surgery is needed by people who live locally.

Secondly, for the past seven years we have had the prospect of a new location for Rowans surgery on the former Rowans school site. In 2007, as part of a section 106 agreement on a new residential development, it was agreed that a new surgery would be built and would have a reduced rent for six years. When the property market slowed in the recession, the deal was put on hold. Now this long-standing scheme continues to await approval from the new NHS England. We are desperate to hear from NHS England as to the hopes for a new surgery. This surgery has some of the worst problems in the constituency as regards patients obtaining appointments, and more GPs and more space are desperately needed.

Finally, I would like to mention a bugbear of mine as a constituency MP—the practice of GP surgeries in charging MPs for letters about their constituents. I would be interested to hear other Members’ comments about this. Like all MPs in the House, I hold a weekly advice surgery. I often see my job as making sure that people present their cases for housing or other benefits in the best possible light, and that sometimes includes obtaining medical information to support those cases. I find it difficult to understand, morally, that a GP practice could want to charge an MP £40 for a letter on behalf of a child who is disabled or an elderly person who is vulnerable. I assure Members that this is perfectly legal. It is part of GPs’ contracts and they can do it, but it is wrong that Members should be frustrated by these charges in their attempts to support their most vulnerable constituents. The people concerned are often the least able to meet the charges and the ones who most need help and support.

I would be grateful for any assistance from the Minister and his colleagues in the Government in raising this issue. Undertaking casework is a vital part of the MP’s role and we should be allowed to contact GPs, whose primary function, I thought, was to assist their patients in an holistic sense, rather than just in the medical sense. We all know that housing and support from social services can assist people’s health as much as individual medical care. I ask for the support of all Members in respect of those charges.