National Health Service

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and I hope that my intervention allows him to cool his jets a little. One cannot make a case about this by arguing about minutiae. Will he accept that for many of us the reality of the NHS is what we see at Central Middlesex hospital, where somebody turns up on a Monday to be told that the accident and emergency department closed on the previous Friday and has now been rebranded without there having been any democratic input? If one has any complaints about that, however, one should not even bother trying to find a person to speak to. That is the reality. The NHS is over-commercialised and is losing touch with its roots.

[Chris Skidmore]

The hon. Gentleman will regret his comments. We have to pay back £65 billion on PFI deals that were originally signed for £11 billion—that ain’t minutiae. Many constituents are concerned about the waste that took place under the previous Government.

In 1997, there were 23,400 managers. That has gone up to 42,500. We are making a genuine attempt to tackle the problem. I could go on, but I will put the party politics aside.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

There are few areas of our work in this House that may be described, honestly and without hysteria, as matters of life and death. The national health service is so utterly central to our existence, our future and the hopes of our country that it is no surprise that the emotions it engenders are as strong as those that have been witnessed on the Floor of the House this afternoon.

I have to tell the Secretary of State that he has a problem. He is a man of great charm, he is widely liked and he is popular, yet he has not sealed the deal on his disintegration, disaggregation and atomisation of the national health service. He has not been able to persuade the Royal College of General Practitioners, which tells us that three quarters of its members oppose it. He has not been able to persuade Professor Malcolm Grant, his own choice to run the commissioning board, who describes the plan as “completely unintelligible”. The Secretary of State wishes to persuade the nation that it is appropriate, at this time of all times, to spend about £3 billion on reorganisation—money that could be far better spent dealing with the dental abscess of the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) and all the other problems that face us.

The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) spoke for many in the House when she prayed for a depoliticisation of this issue. The reality is that the national health service was born amid the gun smoke of political opposition; it was born opposed entirely by one political party in this House and supported by another. Of the supporters—

[Mr Brine]

rose—

[Stephen Pound]

Hold on a moment, I am just having a rant.

Of the supporters, let us give credit—because there once was a time when we could give credit to a decent, humane, sensible, consistent bunch of men and women—to the Liberals of those days and to Beveridge for the work that he did. Above all, let us never forget the transcendent genius of a south Wales miner’s son who left school at the age of 14, Aneurin Bevan, who gave us our national—I emphasise “national”—health service.

[Mr Brine]

I apologise profusely for interrupting a rant that I was enjoying. While we are on the subject of opposition to the conception of the national health service, can we place on record the fact that the British Medical Association also opposed it?

[Stephen Pound]

May I thank the hon. Gentleman? I do not know how anyone persuaded him to bowl me that patsy ball that I can immediately crack to the boundary. He is absolutely right. Dr Hill, the radio doctor, opposed the national health service. Aneurin Bevan said that he had had to

“stuff their mouths with gold”.

Of course the producer interest opposed the beginning of the national health service because it was about the consumers—that was its major difference. Of course the vested interests opposed the creation of the national health service—that is no surprise. But that was then.

The national health service was born in compromise. I was born in July 1948, as was the NHS. For many years I was suspected to have been the first child ever born on the NHS, in Queen Charlotte’s hospital, but somebody in Salford beat me to it.

[Barbara Keeley]

Trafford.

[Stephen Pound]

Trafford. I beg your pardon. However, the year before I was born, my parents had a son who died at the age of seven months. The year before that, they had another son who died at the age of eight months. I was born on 5 July 1948, two days after the health service, and I have my five brothers and sisters alive to this day. It is that important.

When I worked as a porter for 10 years at the Middlesex hospital, where my sister and wife were nurses and one of my brothers was an ambulance driver—half the family seemed to be employed there—we realised the consequences of the pragmatic approach to the health service. We had a private patients wing where people like myself, paid by the national health service, did work for people who paid money to a difference source, and where doctors trained under the NHS got personal recompense. One of the single most important aspects of our lives has been political from day one.

Each of the Health Ministers will remember, as I do, that we have sat in the same House as an hon. Member who lost his seat over a hospital closure. Let us never forget Wyre Forest and Kidderminster hospital. It is almost impossible to be objective about this issue. When the Turnberg report was published, it proposed an entirely sensible reconfiguration of London’s acute general hospitals, but it was opposed by almost everyone because of parochial and local issues. When polyclinics were proposed under the previous Government—one of the most logical, sensible, rational and helpful ways of providing primary health care—they were violently opposed by the Conservative party.

The situation now is that there is no consensus. However, I have not often seen anything quite so consensual, positive and forward-looking as the reference in today’s motion to an offer made by the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Health Secretary of

“cross-party talks on reforming NHS commissioning.”

What could be better for the country, and for the reputation of this House, than our recognising that the NHS is not a political football or an issue on which we can strike postures? Yes, there are ideological differences between us, and Opposition Members may wish to see a greater infusion of finance-led choice, more and more commercialisation and an end to the Whitley system, which has survived for so many years. They may wish to see local pay bargaining setting hospital against hospital, clinic against clinic and clinician against clinician, with a constant stream of industrial disputes as localised pay bargaining bursts out all over the place in some industrial conflagration that attracts even more attention. At the moment we have one of the lowest numbers of hospital managers anywhere in Europe, and we will inevitably have to spend more and more on a greater and greater number of managers to deal with all that localised bargaining.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Stephen Pound]

I will give way to my hon. Friend, who knows far more about the subject than I do.

[Debbie Abrahams]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I am greatly enjoying his speech. Does he agree that the opening up of competition under the Health and Social Care Bill as it stands will be a real threat to the NHS as we know it?

[Stephen Pound]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and may I place it on record that, as I am sure virtually everybody in the House would agree, she has brought enormous expertise in this area to the House, for which we are extremely grateful?

The NHS cannot be disaggregated. It has to be a national health service, not a notional health service, a postcode health service, a better-in-some-parts-than-others health service or a good-for-Kensington-bad-for-Kidderminster health service. It has to be for the nation, and why? Because Beveridge did not just produce a one-point proposal for the NHS. There were actually five evils that he wished to slay. It was an integrated proposal that addressed want, hunger, ambition and other issues.

The NHS is not just an agency to patch people up; it is part of providing a healthy, productive nation and increasing the good and the good life within this country. At so many levels, we have to look beyond the bottom line and beyond, as the hon. Member for Southport said, the bean-counting philosophy. The NHS should not be about the click of the abacus in some cobwebbed recess, or about constantly seeking whether things can be bought cheaper here or commissioned for a lower price there. It should not be about container-loads of cheap goods being shipped in from Shanghai because some GP commissioning group somewhere has discovered it can get a discount on Tubigrip. It should be about the recognition that the health of a nation is utterly crucial, basic and intrinsic to that nation’s hope and future. Without health, we have no future.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I am sorry to break my hon. Friend’s flow, but is it not the underlying principle of this country that we take care of one another? That is the principle behind the NHS and what the NHS stands for.

[Stephen Pound]

It has been said—not by me, but by some—that the NHS has almost become the national religion. They say that as Christianity has faded, as it has in some places—not in my constituency, and certainly not in my home—the NHS has become more important. The NHS is the perfect example of what Galbraith called the “gift relationship”, when we look out for one another. We should not constantly look for the bottom line, but instead look to be our brothers’ keepers. That is the principle—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.