Delivery of Public Services

Steven Bonnar Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Daly]

I remember another slogan from when Labour left office: “there is no money.” I agree with my hon. Friend.

We talk about figures all too often in this House, and we can come up with any figure. It could be £1 billion, £2 billion, £500 billion or £500 million. That is not the delivery of public services; it is just us coming up with figures. The question is: what delivery model will get bang for our buck and deliver services so that people in Scotland do not wait so long in A&E and so waiting lists are not as long in Wales? The delivery model is the issue.

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman keeps referring to the healthcare system in Scotland. When will the English Government implement free prescriptions and free annual eyecare for the people of England? When will they implement free social care for the elderly in England?

[James Daly]

There is record investment in the NHS in England, and it is for the decision makers, those who deliver frontline services and medical professionals to make those choices. The hon. Gentleman is saying that politicians, not medical professionals, should decide the right choices for patients. [Interruption.] It is strange that he is laughing, but he makes my point on the method of delivery.

I have a constituency example of what this Government have done to deliver public services. I have already spoken of the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s appalling supervision that led directly to my local police services, and the local police services of my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson), being put in special measures, and to the most vulnerable people in our communities being put at risk. My local council, a Labour council, was given £122 million to support people, businesses and frontline services during the pandemic. Under the £37 billion package that was before the House last week, 12,000 households in my constituency will get at least £600 to support them through this period, and most of them will get up to £1,200. When we talk about those figures and what the Government have done, we see that they are supporting the people in Bury to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. The problem is that the delivery model is Labour-controlled Bury Council, which is incompetent, I am afraid, and its record would suggest that. We therefore need a wider debate about how we link the money that the Budget and the Treasury gives to local and regional government and how that is spent in the most efficient way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Firth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Nor would we have come out of lockdown at the earliest possible moment, which has preserved the economy and jobs. The main point, however, is that we have heard no solutions from the Opposition.

The motion mentions GP and hospital appointments, and that is what I want to talk about today. In the health system, the Government are looking for new, innovative solutions to solve the problems that we are experiencing. Of course there are problems: we have just been through a global pandemic which saw the whole country in lockdown and our hospitals and GPs focused on treating millions of covid patients and on the vaccination programme that I have just been talking about, so inevitably there have been delays to regular and routine appointments.

[Steven Bonnar]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way; she is being very generous.

I wonder how much responsibility she thinks the Prime Minister should bear for that situation, given that in the very early stages of the pandemic he was coming in here and gloating about shaking hands with covid patients. That set the scene for the early response from the Government to the pandemic.

[Anna Firth]

I think the hon. Gentleman is missing the entire point that I am making. I am acknowledging that our health service has quite rightly been treating covid patients. Now that the pandemic is over, we are of course looking towards dealing with the backlog.

In Southend West, I, like many Members in other constituencies, receive complaints every week from constituents who are experiencing delays in getting appointments with their GPs. One constituent who wrote to me had suffered a minor head injury and ended up having to call an ambulance and go to the local A&E because they could not get a GP appointment. I have raised the issue of ambulances in the House before. However, we have a Secretary of State who is focusing on the issue and is already making progress. That is why we were able to announce this week that we are set to eliminate two-year waiting lists by July, and that is why, because of our management of the economy, the NHS budget is set to grow by an average of 3.8% every year up to 2024-25. As we have heard, by the end of this Parliament we will be spending £188 billion on the NHS, up from £133 billion. That is an increase of £54 billion—over 40%. That is possible despite the poor financial circumstances that we inherited. This Government have increased investment in the NHS every year since we came into office in 2010.

In Southend West, which I represent, we are leading the way in improving people’s healthcare. Due to the actions of myself and other Essex MPs, we will have an increase of 111 ambulance staff over the coming months and 11 new ambulances will be on our roads by the end of July. Earlier this month, Southend Hospital began an innovative enhanced discharge service. This is a collaboration between the council, the clinical commissioning group and the hospital, and it is helping people to get home when they have been in hospital, and to stay there. It is a brilliant therapy-led assessment service that really puts people at the heart of ongoing care, and I am delighted that the Government are supporting the scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the motion today. The official Opposition termed the subject “Backlog Britain”, but “Backlog, broken, Brexit Britain” would have been a more apt and relevant title—they should shoulder their portion of responsibility for much of that, given their leader’s weakness and their inability to hold this shambolic Prime Minister and his Government to account.

The UK is the sick man of Europe, with a despot leader who does not rely on the rule of law to keep order—quite the opposite; he chooses to break it freely and consistently, whether international or domestic, with nothing limited or specific about it. As with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill that came through this place last night, laws are being broken knowingly and willingly.

If I were to throw out the figure of tens of thousands, I would be speaking not about the opportunities made available to us via a post-Brexit bonanza, but the number of people waiting for their passports to be processed by this Government’s Passport Office—a number that grows by the hour. It is frankly staggering that this Tory Government have sunk to this new low, such a low that they now cannot even get the most basic of tasks, arming our citizens with their passports, sorted out. The reality is that I could have picked any Government Department to focus my comments on today. The DVLA, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office—the whole Government are in complete disarray.

Everyone could see that in excess of 5 million people would be applying for passport renewals this year in the wake of a pandemic which saw two lockdowns where people could not leave their house, far less the country. The impeccable foresight of this Government led them to do what? To create more backlogs than necessary by cutting the number of civil servants staffing those Departments by more than a fifth in the past couple of years. They have plunged the entire travel industry even further into chaos in the wake of their incompetent pandemic border policy, with people now forced to cancel flights and travel plans due to the delay in issuing passports.

It would be remiss of me, when touching on transport matters, not to put on record my solidarity with and support for the workforce and the members of the RMT union striking for a fair pay for a fair day. I also place on record my admiration for Mick Lynch, leader of the RMT union, in how he has handled the heavily slanted media reporting we have seen from some commentators across the Brit-Nat media outlets—for the avoidance of doubt, I am talking about Sky and the BBC. I also noted with some admiration his choice of socialist revolutionary.

Issuing passports and driving licences and keeping people on the move via public transport are the very basic asks of any Government. Yet this Government, led by a law-breaking Prime Minister, have utterly failed our constituents on every count. Families across the four nations of the UK, as we all know well, are already suffering under the turbocharged Tory cost of living crisis, and yet this Government are completely failing to even acknowledge their mismanagement of the situation.

Blissful ignorance works well for the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and it looks to be catching right across that Government Front Bench. The Government know fine well that the cost of living is rocketing and that, for the vast majority of those we represent, every penny is a calculated and measured spend. Yet my constituents have been left with the only viable option of paying extra of their hard-earned money, in the hope of obtaining their passport in time for travel. It is completely unacceptable—but, of course, an inhumane policy such as the despicable Rwanda plan, which costs half a million pounds for every empty plane sent, must be funded somehow, mustn’t it?

My constituency office in Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill has been inundated with hundreds upon hundreds of passport, visa and immigration related inquiries. I have constituents who need to spend whatever little time is left with a terminally ill parent in Australia, met with intransigence; another who needs to access urgent specialist cancer treatment in Canada, met with intransigence by this Government; and another who needs to attend their brother’s funeral in India, met with inaction from the Government. Those are real concerns, real problems, real emergencies and real people that this Government do not have a shred of compassion for, let alone any attempt to understand or accommodate. While we focus on trying to sort this stuff, highlighting individual Government inadequacies along the way, that leaves less and less time for the long list of other issues that we need to deal with that are once again at the heart of this Government’s “steal from the poor and give to the rich” agenda.

[Paul Holmes]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Steven Bonnar]

I have heard enough from Conservative Members, and the hon. Gentleman has spoken many times, so I will push on and make the points that I am here to make.

The cost of living is getting higher and higher for our constituents. There is the cost of gas and electric, and of petrol. There are the soaring food prices for families and sky-high council bills, and inflation is soaring over 9%. That is all before the real implications of Brexit, which are staring us all right in the face, truly begin to bite. This is, without question, the most incompetent Prime Minister that this place has ever seen, but those on the Labour Benches do not get away scot-free. The Leader of the Opposition and of the supposed workers’ party is too busy banning his own MPs from picket lines to do so much as land a glove on the Prime Minister. We in Scotland know that both parties in this House shoulder some of the responsibility for the absolute shambles of Brexit, and of the Brexit negotiations thereafter. It is down to both the Government and Labour, with their “We will make Brexit work” mantra. Brexit will not work. It certainly will not work for Scotland.

Thankfully for the people of Scotland, we have a way out—another option. We have a choice. The people of Scotland will weigh up the potential of an independent Scotland in Europe, versus the pain of a backward, broken, Brexit Britain. There is no choice at all this time around; the day is fast approaching when we take back our independence.