NHS Funding

Debate between Stephen Dorrell and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dorrell]

I agree completely with the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of the challenge. I was looking forward to him congratulating the Government on taking a step in the right direction, although it is not a total solution, by investing in prevention some of the resources in the health care. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman indicates that it is only a little and that it should be more.

We need to look across the statutory divide that reflects history, but not the demands of today’s generation of patients. The key thing that we must recognise in the debate about health and care is that we have inherited a system, which all of us have supported through most of its history, that is built on the assumption that the typical patient will be restored to good health. In Bevan’s day, that was true of the typical patient in the health and care system, but it is not true of the typical patient in today’s system. The majority of the resources in today’s health and care system go towards delivering care to people who will not be restored to full health. That, not surprisingly, requires a different set of institutions, shaped in a different way from the institutions that we have inherited from history.

The challenge that faces all of us in this House who care about the health and care system is not to protect the different bits of the system as though they were listed buildings, but to change the system so that it uses today’s technologies to meet the needs of today’s patients. That is the core challenge that faces my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his colleagues and, if I may say so, the right hon. Member for Leigh and his shadow ministerial colleagues.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Dorrell]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will not.

For the second half of this Parliament, we could have a reprise of the first half and we could trade party political slogans about a system that increasingly thinks that the political debate has nothing to do with it, or we could engage with the people who understand what real life feels like on the front line of the system, which has been described by one or two Opposition Members, and we could show that we in this House support the need for change in order to use taxpayers’ resources to meet taxpayers’ health and care needs. That is the real challenge that faces the House this evening.

National Health Service

Debate between Stephen Dorrell and Graham Stuart

Monday 16th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris), who is a member of the Health Committee. I hope he will forgive me if I do not follow him down the specialist course of radiotherapy services.

I want to address my remarks primarily to the shadow Health Secretary and to begin with an echo from a different era. When I first came to the House, there used to be something called “Whitelaw’s law”, which, obviously, referred to the late Willie Whitelaw. “The more he blusters,” we used to say, “the less he believes it.” The shadow Health Secretary gave us an Olympic-class demonstration of the principle of Whitelaw’s law. He blustered from the Dispatch Box and got himself into several dead ends. It became clear that he did not really believe that he had answers for the challenges facing the NHS.

I refer the right hon. Gentleman to a point that he made and which I agree with. The most important statement about the current state of the health service was not made by him as Secretary of State—and, with great respect to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, it was not made by him either. It was made by Sir David Nicholson in his annual report to the national health service in May 2009, and it was endorsed by the right hon. Gentleman. Sir David said, looking forward to the period of this Parliament:

“we must be prepared for a range of scenarios, including the possibility that investment will be frozen for a time. We should also plan on the assumption that we will need to release unprecedented levels of efficiency savings between 2011 and 2014—between £15 billion and £20 billion across the service over the three years.”

I agreed with what the shadow Secretary of State said about the importance of what we, in the Health Committee, dubbed “the Nicholson challenge”. I believe that that is the central challenge facing the national health service. The sadness in this debate was that the right hon. Gentleman gave us no hint as to how he believes the health service should address that central challenge about which he and I agree.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Meeting that challenge, and dealing with the challenges in the NHS generally, would be all the more difficult if one believed, as the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) does, that real-terms increases in investment in the NHS are irresponsible.

[Mr Dorrell]

I agree with my hon. Friend, but let us not go down that route. At the time when Sir David Nicholson was writing, the Labour Government were contemplating the possibility not of a real-terms freeze, which is in effect what is planned under the coalition, but of a cash freeze, which would have been substantially more difficult to achieve.

The main issue now is how we deliver services that meet the demands placed on the system against the background of a resource allocation to the health service that was always going to be dramatically less generous than it was during the earlier years of the Labour Government. We heard from the right hon. Gentleman a commitment that an incoming Labour Government would go through a clean-sheet-of-paper redrawing of the map—