National Health Service
Debate between Stephen Pound and Andy Burnham(12 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
Further to the previous question, the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) has said that this is all about finance, and she may well be right. However, bearing in mind the fact that Ealing hospital not only came in under budget but produced an operating surplus last year, what possible justification can there be for ripping this crucial and much-needed service from the heart of our community?
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend makes his point powerfully. With some reconfigurations there is a clinical case supporting change, such as the changes I introduced in London before the last election to improve stroke services. We reduced the number of centres from 12 to eight. That was a difficult decision for many London Members at the time, but it was the right thing to do because lives are being saved. However, there is a world of difference between those changes and the crude, cost-driven reconfigurations in the NHS that those on the Government Benches said they would not allow.
I spent my weekend reading a very entertaining book entitled “Never Again? The story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012: A study in coalition government and policy making”. It is a very interesting book and offers a new, detailed account, by Nick Timmins, of the Government’s NHS reorganisation—or, as it says on the blurb, the inside story of a “car crash”. I particularly enjoyed the quotation from the Minister of State—I gather that he has not read it, but there he is, up in lights at the very beginning of the book. He made this comment about the then Bill, which the author thought worthy of special attention:
“You cannot encapsulate in one or two sentences the main thrust of this.”
He should know that better than anybody, as he toured more media studios than anybody, and used more sentences than anyone, in a vain attempt to sell the technocratic and dense plans that made sense to his boss and nobody else.