A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

Taiwo Owatemi Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab) [V]]

I start by thanking the NHS and all the staff at University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire for all the incredible hard work that they have done over the past year.

I would like to highlight one of my constituents’ most pressing topics of concern, which is the need to rebuild our NHS and reform social care. Everyone in Britain has the right to be kept in good health and cared for from cradle to grave. It saddens me, therefore, that far too little is being done to fulfil that promise and that our NHS staff are paying the price for the failures of those in government. With children’s mental health referrals increasing by a third last year alone, over 1 million patients waiting more than six months to start treatment, and 370,000 suspected cancer cases that have gone unseen by specialists, now is the time for an NHS rescue plan.

The pandemic has exposed the issues that 10 years of austerity created for the NHS. Unable to paper over the cracks any longer, we can now see how badly the Government prepared our health system for this crisis. The NHS is not failing; it is just being failed. Even before the pandemic struck, we were short of 40,000 nurses and 7,000 doctors in all settings, and the number of community nurses, health visitors and mental healthcare specialists had all been cut between 2010 and 2020—a conscious choice made by this Government to run down the services that we all rely on. That is why we need bolder remedies than the weak response proposed by the Government. Embarrassed by the crisis that their cuts caused, they are short on ideas and even shorter on answers.

Nowhere is this clearer than in social care. Each and every year, we have been promised far-reaching reforms, and every year this Government have proved to be an abject disappointment. One and a half million people have unmet care needs in Britain today. We cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care too, yet the Government have so far been woefully unable to fill the over 110,000 vacancies open in the sector. The care system’s problems run from top to bottom. Carers are paid low wages on zero-hours contracts that rarely provide them with the time or resources to offer the comprehensive, high-quality care that they themselves want to give.

Funding, too, is in a state of acute crisis. The Government’s cowardly choice to pass the brunt of austerity on to local councils has stripped £8 billion from care budgets over the last decade. Millions of older people now fear that they will lose everything they own—everything they have worked for their entire lives—simply to afford the most basic care in their last years.

With 2,000 people with learning disabilities trapped in unsuitable care settings and a lack of beds accounted for by fully one third of patients stuck in hospitals waiting to be discharged, now is the time for wholesale reform. We have a duty to make the “new normal” better than what came before. The NHS needs its funding restored and its vacancies filled. The backlog of operations, referrals and appointments must be cleared. Our care system, left in the lurch for so long, must finally be reformed to meet the standards we expect, with better paid, better trained staff, who have the time to care for those in their charge.

In closing, I will say this. The Government are eager to claim the NHS’s successes as their own, but we should thank instead the thousands of healthcare workers who have done more than ever before to keep the system going. They gave us their all. Who are we to do any less in return?