Health

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I will move on to that point. Whenever there is a problem, we are told, “Speak to NHS England.” I am afraid that is not good enough. Up and down the country we are seeing services closed without adequate consultation. NHS walk-in centres continue to be closed, piling more pressure on A and E departments. It is just not good enough. We have seen top-down changes driven through, and the hospital closure clause is on the books, so sadly this will continue. It will only change when we have a Labour Government back in control—a Government committed to putting the public and patient voice at the very heart of the NHS.

I was talking about A and E and the reorganisation. We know that Ministers were explicitly warned about an A and E recruitment crisis by the College of Emergency Medicine a couple of years ago, but they said they were too absorbed with the reorganisation to listen or act. That brings me to the nub of the matter before the House: the root cause of the deterioration in the NHS is that reorganisation, which nobody wanted and nobody voted for. It threw the service into chaos just when it needed stability. As we warned, it has damaged standards of patient care. Four years ago the Government inherited a self-confident and successful NHS, with the lowest ever waiting times and the highest ever public satisfaction. Since then it has been destabilised, demoralised and reduced to an uncertain organisation that is increasingly fearful of the future.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman refers to cuts in funding. The only cuts in funding that we have seen in this country have been in the NHS in Wales. With regard to patient satisfaction, I can assure him that the targets left behind by the previous Labour Government did nothing to satisfy patients who were left on the ground by ambulance services because they had already gone past the eight or 19-minute limit. I am afraid that the focus on targets, rather than patients, is something that this Government have had to address.

[Andy Burnham]

I think that it would behove Government Members to have a bit more self-reflection and humility. The hon. Lady was not a Member of the House at the time, but she may recall that before 1997 people used to spend years on NHS waiting lists, and some never came off them. Over Labour’s 13 years in government we saw waiting lists come down, and down, and down, to the point that, when we left office, they were at their lowest ever level. I am not claiming that the NHS was perfect and did everything right, but it had the highest ever level of public satisfaction. We must have done something right. A bit of balance and accuracy in this debate is just what the NHS needs.