Oral Answers to Questions

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Minister, I like your style, but your answers are far too long for my health.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a serving Norfolk county councillor.

It is two years since the Conservatives in Norfolk oversaw the closure of two convalescence facilities: Benjamin Court in Cromer and Grays Fair Court in Costessey, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis). This was done without public consultation, and it has been met with outcry from local residents. This short-sighted move will only worsen the backlogs at local hospitals and reduce options for my constituents who need extra support. Will the Minister meet me and his hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South to discuss how we can ensure that these vital convalescence facilities will not be lost?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We need shorter questions.

Jhoots Pharmacy

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

As I said, we are in constant dialogue with ICBs and the GPhC. I absolutely get it: we need to speed it up as it needs to be faster and more urgent. I am clear about that, and we are taking this forward as a matter of priority.

In terms of taking action against individual directors, nothing is off the table. As I said, the regulatory framework as things stand does not facilitate that, so we have got to look at other options. But there are views in the GPhC that suggest there may be some ways of looking at interpreting regulations and legislation that could facilitate more immediate action. That is on the menu of actions that we are looking at.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

For almost two years now, the people of Sheringham have been suffering from completely unacceptable service from our local branch of Jhoots. Shortages of drugs, shortages of pharmacists, issues with paying staff and a litany of other issues have caused chaos, including one resident sent by NHS 111 to secure emergency antibiotics finding themselves standing in the rain outside a closed pharmacy, fearful that they would end up in A&E. Will the Minister tell people in Sheringham and the surrounding villages what protection there will be for services if Jhoots is no longer fit to provide them? How is taxpayers’ money being protected from being lost? Most importantly, how on earth was it allowed to get this bad in the first place?

[Stephen Kinnock]

In terms of the replacement for Jhoots services, that is where we are in a Catch-22 situation, because until a pharmacy that is not providing a service has been moved out of the way, it is not possible to move in and replace that service with another, so the first step in all this is to take action against those pharmacies that are not delivering to requisite service standards. As soon as we can get that process moving, we can start to commission and bring in alternative providers. I share his frustration and the impatience of his constituents, and I assure him that we are taking urgent action on all these issues.

Department of Health and Social Care

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

In the limited time available, I want to press the Government on a very live and urgent issue, which is the establishment of a dental school at the University of East Anglia. Currently, there is no dental school in the entire east of England. The Government accept that Norfolk is the Sahara of dental deserts. My constituents were excited by the prospect, as early as next September, of Norfolk training its own dentists. Just last week, the General Dental Council gave its approval for the new dental school and work is already under way at the UEA to create the facilities for this training.

Things ground to a halt, however, when the Government were unwilling to allocate the funding to ensure that places would be available in time for the UCAS deadline for 2026 entry, saying that we all needed to wait for the spending review. A frustrating delay, lost time to prepare and perhaps a lost year, but we reluctantly accepted the need to wait to receive this good news. And then the spending review came. And went. And we heard nothing: total radio silence from the Government on the future of this much-needed dental school. I tabled a written question to the Government directly after the review and they have refused to answer it. The silence is causing worries to increase.

There is a clear link between the lack of training opportunities in the east and the massive oral health inequalities we are facing. If we do not train in Norfolk, we cannot retain in Norfolk. People love our area. When they study here, many stay. It would be just the same with dentists. And we need it to be, because in Norfolk and Waveney we have so few dentists that each new one would be required to serve 3,000 people, based on current ratios. It is not tough maths to realise that, with the number of hours in a day and days in a year, people will go a long time without seeing a dentist, if they can get on an NHS list at all.

These are not just numbers and stats, these are real people: the people in my community. I would welcome anyone who is moving the money around spreadsheets in the Treasury or the Department of Health and Social Care to come to explain the dither and delay to their faces—some of which can no longer manage to muster a smile.

The situation has become untenable, but we have the opportunity for real improvement. We have cross-party support across Norfolk’s MPs from all parties, and I know that the Minister responsible, the Minister for Care, gets it—he has heard the stories, and I truly believe he cares. I hope that he can now deliver on the concern and warm words that we have welcomed and deliver us the dental school we need now.

Access to NHS Dentistry

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for securing this debate—the application for which I was pleased to support.

I would like to tell the House about Philip, who wrote to me, in his own words, in “desperation”. He is a proud armed forces veteran and was recovering from a recent surgery for lung cancer when he suffered a fall, which caused him to lose a number of his teeth. After his maxillofacial surgery, he was horrified to discover that there were no dentists taking NHS patients near him, and his previous dentist had simply removed him from their system. He needed dentures—not just for cosmetic reasons, but to be able to eat proper meals—and was facing a future without any of this support.

Cases like Philip’s will ring true, I am sure, for far too many people here, and indeed across my constituency. I am pleased to say that in this instance, my team and I got straight on the case and were able to help Philip to secure an NHS appointment with a local dentist earlier this week. We look forward to seeing him with a full smile again soon. However, we cannot do that for the two thirds of my constituents who are not seeing an NHS dentist, and nor should we have to. We need to fix the broken system that is letting down people in North Norfolk.

One exciting prospect on the horizon is the establishment of a dental school at the University of East Anglia, as my near neighbour, the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough), has already mentioned. The school has support from Members of all parties in Norfolk, and we are excited for Norfolk to start training and placing its own dentists in the coming years. However, the University of East Anglia needed funding for places from the Government confirmed before 2 May in order to appear in the UCAS applications for students beginning in September 2026, but the Treasury has demanded that any such spending not be confirmed until the spending review in a few weeks’ time. For the sake of less than six weeks of bureaucracy, my constituents face yet another full year of delay.

Nevertheless, I am pleased that it was confirmed this week that Cromer will have an expanded dental practice that will take on new NHS patients. The Lib Dem-led North Norfolk district council has worked to secure a new lease with the Dental Design Studio on the former tourist information centre. The new practice will have five surgeries, all at ground level to improve accessibility. After years of decline, we may finally be seeing the green shoots of improvement in North Norfolk’s part of the dental desert.

I am pleased to have the opportunity today to stand up for everyone who has struggled with our crumbling system over the past few years—for people like Philip, for the many children facing tooth decay, for all those on waiting lists and for those forced to fork out for private treatment. Things must improve, and they can. I will be fighting hard to ensure that they do.

Access to Dentistry: Somerset

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 1st April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Anna Sabine]

Yes, there are certainly some horror stories about tooth removal. It does beg the question as to why NHS dental services in Somerset and the wider south-west have deteriorated in the last seven years. It seems to me that that is symptomatic of a lack of investment in the region, in terms of not only health and social care but withdrawn levelling-up funding and diverted rural England prosperity funding.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

My hon. Friend talks about the need for investment, and much of that will be in training new dentists. Does she therefore agree that it is baffling that a brand-new dental school at the University of East Anglia could be delayed by a full year because the Treasury refuses to release funding until a month after the deadline for UCAS course listings, and that another year’s delay is unacceptable for her constituents in Somerset and mine in North Norfolk?

[Anna Sabine]

That sounds very frustrating, particularly when, as we are seeing, there are so many crises in our dental services.

A constituent emailed me in February to say that four weeks previously her husband, who is in his late forties, had had a massive stroke. He collapsed into the sink in the kitchen and hit his face on the taps, breaking his teeth. He was discharged from hospital on 14 February, but cannot speak, is partially paralysed, needs continuing care, rehabilitation and adjustment, and is suffering dental pain. He is not registered with an NHS dentist and cannot afford private dental care, so they called 111 and, after four calls, drove to an appointment where the dentist was given just 30 minutes to treat only one tooth, which he had to remove. My constituents will have to call 111 again to get treatment for the next tooth. The husband needs dentures, is on soft foods and is still in pain. As that case shows, and as my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) pointed out, a failure to invest now in dentistry not only causes more pain for the individual, but gets more expensive and adds to pressure on other areas of the NHS in the longer term.

Department of Health and Social Care

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

I share my hon. Friend’s frustration that we are not doing more faster. Indeed, the first inquiry that our Committee has launched is on social care and the cost of inaction, because there is a cost to doing nothing, and we need to quantify that as best we can.

On the three shifts, the shift to the community is incredibly important, not least because successive Secretaries of State have said that they want that shift, yet the money has flowed in the opposite direction.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

In Cromer in my constituency, about 18 months ago, the Conservative-controlled county council closed down Benjamin Court reablement centre. That is exactly the sort of facility that we need to help bridge the gap between acute hospitals and community and primary care. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must work to reopen those facilities, which do not stand a chance until there is proper integration of NHS budgets and the budgets of adult social care providers?

[Layla Moran]

We should be celebrating examples of where this works well, not shutting them down.

In Oxford, the Hospital at Home programme, run by Oxford University hospital ambulatory team, does incredible work. I visited 91-years-young Mavis the other day, who was receiving top-notch ultrasounds in her home—ultrasounds of better quality than those that she would have got in the hospital. That saves hundreds of pounds for the NHS and means no long trip for her and her family. That is definitely something that we should do more of.

Let me turn to the estimates, because they are why we are here. The supplementary estimates have been published. I will not hit anyone over the head with them—they are incredibly heavy. They are worth a read. They talk about a £198.5 billion day-to-day spending budget. At face value, that is an increase of £10.9 billion on the estimate from July, but £9.2 billion is for staff pay increases. Let us be clear: staff deserve that pay rise. It is long overdue. Retention and mental health are important, and we must invest in our workforce, but that does leave just £1.7 billion.

Accessibility of Radiotherapy

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

Yes, I absolutely do agree with my hon. Friend. Travel times, which I will come on to in a moment, do have an impact on outcomes—in other words, whether people survive—because there is an impact on the extent to which a person will be referred for treatment depending on how close they are to the nearest site. What she says is absolutely right, especially for her communities.

For my constituents, the two, three or in some cases four-hour round trip to the excellent but distant Rosemere cancer unit at Preston is not just inconvenient, but debilitating and cruel. It means that many do not complete their treatment, and many choose not even to start such treatment. Some do not even get referred for radiotherapy in the first place, because clinicians understandably conclude that the patient is not strong enough to cope with the rigours of travelling such distances so frequently. For us in Westmorland, longer journeys mean shorter lives.

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing such an important debate, especially on World Cancer Day. In my constituency of North Norfolk, Radiotherapy UK found that nobody can access radiotherapy treatment within 75 minutes by public transport. Does he agree that we need a two-pronged approach to tackle this—to fix our broken public transport infrastructure and to make more services available closer to where people are, such as at Cromer hospital in my constituency?

[Tim Farron]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Back at the time of the last Labour Government, the national radiotherapy advisory group recommended that it was bad practice for anybody to live beyond 45 minutes of a radiotherapy centre one-way, or a round trip of an hour and a half, yet so many people—7.5 million people—including his constituents and my constituents, live beyond that.

Dental Healthcare: East Anglia

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jerome Mayhew]

My answer is yes and no. Over the past 18 months to two years in Norfolk and Waveney, a lot of money has been spent on increasing access to emergency dentistry. Although I welcomed that and it has helped to deal with some acute issues, there is a much more fundamental problem. We must fix the system rather than decide on the least worst form of emergency care once the problem has become acute.

The big question is why the east of England is in this position. The wrong analysis of how we got here will lead to our imposing the wrong solution. Some people say, “Well, it’s because Norfolk is a remote, rural area with lots of coastline, and that brings problems. If you’re a newly qualified dentist, it’s probably a rather unfashionable place to go to make your new career if you’re not from that neck of the woods. It has a more elderly demographic, which may put off young dentists. It’s not where they want to go to set up their new home.”

Yet compare Norfolk with similar counties, such as Devon. I often use Devon as an example because it shares many characteristics with Norfolk: a slightly older population, a large rural coastline and a pretty similar population size. Look at the number of dentists in Devon: they have 49.6 per 100,000 people, which is far more than we have in the east of England. What is the difference? The answer is obvious. Since 2005, Devon has had a dental training school at Plymouth, which was the last one to be set up. The east of England made a bid for that contract and lost out to the Peninsula bid, and we can see the consequences of that in the teeth of Norfolk residents.

If someone wants to train as a dentist in Norfolk, Suffolk or elsewhere in East Anglia, the nearest place they can go to train is either Birmingham or London. That means that our home-grown talent has to go off somewhere else, several hours away, to train and qualify. The usual things happen: they develop their professional relationships in that region; they meet someone, fall in love and settle down; they put down roots in the community and they stay there and do not come back. The exact opposite is the case for people not from our region who qualify elsewhere. What is the incentive for them to come and set up home in a part of the world that they do not know and that is perhaps not attractive to newly qualified people in their mid-20s?

We also know that about 40% of graduates tend to stay where they train. We have that data from the University of East Anglia and its medical school, because each year it surveys graduates to see where they get their first job and each year about 40% of them take a job locally. This is the really important question for the Minister: do he and his Department accept that analysis? If they do not accept it, what is his explanation for the dearth of NHS dentists and even private dentists in East Anglia?

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, on securing this debate. I cannot speak for the Minister, although I certainly welcome the comments about the importance of a dental school. However, is the issue in East Anglia not a result of the region’s disproportionate failure under the previous Government’s dental recovery plan? It was said that East Anglia would miss its targets and that, even if it did hit them, it would still be 2.6 million dental appointments short of pre-pandemic levels. The hon. Gentleman was on the Government Benches in the last Parliament. Does he not understand why many people across East Anglia hold the Conservatives to account for the situation having become this bad?

[Jerome Mayhew]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s argument, but I do not think that it is particularly helpful. We are trying to work out what the solution is now and going forward. A huge amount of money was spent by central Government on NHS dentistry. The problem we had, as we can demonstrate by the £58 million underspend of the budget that was available, is that there are physically not enough dentists now. That is not a short-term brickbat that can be chucked around for party political points in a Westminster Hall debate at 11.11 on a Wednesday morning. I submit that it is a rather more serious issue that deserves a slightly more serious approach.

NHS Winter Readiness

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your experienced chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing this vital debate. Our rural constituencies share many similarities, and the NHS winter crisis will be as great a source of concern for her constituents as it is for mine. She may or may not have noticed that she was speaking at the same time as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), was in the main Chamber. I am grateful to the Minister for attending the debate at the precise time that her colleagues are responding to my right hon. Friend’s questions. This debate could not be more timely, given the context of today’s Budget and the winter we are rapidly heading into.

As I hope many Members will know, North Norfolk is proudly the constituency with the oldest demographic in the country. That means that when our NHS struggles, North Norfolk is acutely vulnerable to its effects. I pay tribute to the hard work going on in Norfolk to prepare for winter in our health services. Our GP surgeries and community nurses are working day in, day out to deliver flu and covid vaccinations for thousands of eligible residents. I encourage anyone eligible who is yet to take up their free vaccinations to contact their GP and do so. That work is vital to building the resilience of our communities ahead of the cold winter months, and I know that local residents are incredibly grateful for it.

We are once again heading into a difficult winter. In my constituency we have historically had some of the longest ambulance waiting times in the country. In towns and villages such as Blakeney, Cley and Wells-next-the-Sea, people are subjected to appalling and unacceptable wait times for urgent calls. Nationwide, people are fearful of the crisis, with recent polling stating that one in four people have avoided calling an ambulance because they are worried it would take too long to arrive. This cannot carry on.

To ease the pressure on our hospitals this winter, we need people to be able to leave acute settings when they are ready, and to keep well enough to avoid going back in. To add to what my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire said about delayed discharges of care, that is yet another reason why I find myself completely baffled by the decision of the Conservative-led Norfolk county council to close the Benjamin Court reablement facility in Cromer. I declare an interest as a sitting Liberal Democrat member of that council.

The Benjamin Court facility helps to bring people back into the community, enabling them to recover in a more familiar setting. We know that convalescence works, reducing readmittance and enabling people to spend more time with their families as they recover. The integrated care board for Norfolk and Waveney says it wants to place a greater focus on recovery at home. I appreciate that may work for some, but it will not work for many. I am working alongside the campaign to save Benjamin Court to secure the future of the facility. I would greatly appreciate it if the Minister could take the time to meet me and representatives from the campaign to discuss why that vital service must be maintained.

Winter exacerbates one of the major challenges for people in North Norfolk accessing healthcare, which is our inadequate rural public transport. Wintery conditions and car reliance do not mix well; that is the reality that will present to many if they have an early morning appointment at one of our hospitals. People are faced with multi-hour round trips when using rural buses, and limited times when they could make an appointment, let alone the impact that any winter-led delays will have on their plans. To improve my constituents’ access to healthcare, we must also improve their access to public transport.

I fully support the Liberal Democrat plan to winter-proof our NHS, and a winter taskforce with ringfenced funding will go a long way to building the resilience that we need in North Norfolk. We cannot keep lurching from crisis to crisis each winter, stuck in one of the doom loops that the Chancellor spoke about before the Budget. We need to see a change of approach, a funding settlement that is proactive and not reactive, and an NHS that can fully support people across North Norfolk all year round.

Access to Primary Healthcare

Steff Aquarone Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Countless times on the doorstep during the general election campaign I discussed primary care with people in North Norfolk, and the damning legacy of the last Conservative Government means that almost everyone in my area has their own story. Stories of people who are waiting four weeks to see their GP about anything non-urgent; of people whose oral health has declined so much that they are no longer able to smile; of people who are worried for the supplies of vital medicines. The primary care crisis is acutely felt in North Norfolk, and I am glad that it is the Liberal Democrats who will be pushing this Government to bring forward solutions.

Residents in Blakeney are set to lose their rural branch surgery at the start of next month despite overwhelming efforts to save it. Many people who live in Blakeney rely on that surgery and have based their independent living plans around it. Surgeries are key community assets and people will genuinely suffer if they are lost. It is why I have been proud to support our call for a small surgeries fund, to give financial stability to surgeries like that in Blakeney. I hope that today the Minister can tell us whether the Government would support that.

The dentistry crisis is another of the biggest issues for North Norfolk. The hon. Member for Norwich North (Alice Macdonald) reminded us that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care had described Norfolk as the Sahara of dental deserts. I have been pleased with the progress we are making, working with the integrated care board in the months since my election, safeguarding services in Holt and Wells, and pushing forward the case for a new dentistry school at the University of East Anglia. I have enjoyed working with my colleague the hon. Member for Norwich North on that. This issue matters to people like my constituent Alan. He receives no state support despite his wife being unable to work, and when they needed urgent dental treatment he was forced to dip into his small savings. It cannot be right that when someone pays in to the system all his life, it simply is not there when he needs it.

These problems are deeper-rooted. Mental health services do not have the networks to really reach people in rural areas. Our small surgeries are vital because of our lack of public transport infrastructure, our GPs struggle to find new partners because of ballooning property prices, and our pharmacies and hospitals cannot attract the specialists they need because there is not the housing. The solutions to these problems in primary care require an holistic approach, so I hope that the Government are taking steps to stop these problems being siloed.

All Liberal Democrat MPs are champions for our left-behind local health services. I urge the House to support the motion and show that we mean business about bringing our primary care services, like those in North Norfolk, back from the brink.