Children’s Hospices: Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance today, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) for bringing this important debate to this place at this time and for making astonishingly good use of it. There is no doubt whatever that Zoe’s Place and the fundraising appeal will have been benefited materially from his putting this issue before this place, and therefore before the country and his community. I pay tribute to his community for their generosity.

I speak on behalf of the children’s hospice Jigsaw, which serves Cumbria, north Lancashire and the south-west of Scotland, and of Derian House in Chorley, which also serves some of my constituents. The scale of the heartbreaking reality of young people living with life-limiting conditions is mind-blowing. Nobody could fail to be moved by that reality and the impact on the families. It is worth also bearing in mind the immense compassion and professionalism demonstrated at Jigsaw and, indeed, all our hospices. It is true that there is a value in the hospice movement having independence and charitable status. It values that but there is a limit, and what we are looking at today is hospices, particularly children’s hospices, being stretched beyond the limit of their ability to raise the funds that they need to take care of the very poorly children whom they lovingly and so professionally do take care of.

The scale of the issue is worth bearing in mind. For the ICB that covers the southern part of my constituency, Lancashire and South Cumbria, there are currently nearly 3,500 people aged 0 to 24 years with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions. For the ICB for north Cumbria, which includes the whole north-east of England as well, the figure is more than 6,000. The money spent per head is £18.86 per child. If we think about the whole hospice movement serving Cumbria—St Mary’s at Ulverston, St John’s at Lancaster, Derian House, Eden Valley Hospice and Jigsaw—we are talking about the taxpayer, the NHS, being saved £33 million every single year because of the support that those hospices give in providing palliative and end of life care for people of all ages.

There is a particular thing that I want to raise about Jigsaw and the threat that it faces. It is a relatively small children’s hospice serving a very large rural county. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the importance of hospice at home, for example. The support that Jigsaw gives families outside the hospice is also massively important. But in recent years, of course, inflation has had an impact on fundraising. Look at energy bills: there has been an increase of something like 30% in overheads for most children’s hospices, including Jigsaw. Also, of course, hospices need and want to compete with the NHS on the pay that they give their excellent staff, but they are not funded. When the NHS has a pay rise, each part of the NHS, generally speaking, gets the funding to cover it, but not children’s hospices, so we are calling for ringfencing and central distribution of the money to hospices and for increases if at all possible.

I want to say a particular word about the complexity of our communities. I do not want to overly criticise our ICBs, but we have a children’s hospice that serves two, and as a result, getting the money out of them can be very difficult. It should not be for children’s hospices to work so tirelessly to drag money out of the public sector and to raise so much from voluntary services when what they are trying to do is to provide compassionate, professional, end of life care for children. It is time today for the Chancellor to step up and fund our hospices, including Jigsaw, in a way that is permanent, reliable and sufficient.

Access to Primary Healthcare

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan]

That is an important point. In my constituency, carers who go to pick up prescription medicines are finding that the pharmacists are not there because they are relying on locums. The pharmacy funding problem needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, and I will say more about that later.

Growing the economy is so important that we need to get people off the waiting and referral lists and back into work. Liberal Democrats believe that people should be in control of their own lives, not “chained up” at home, unable to get out of bed, because they have no access to healthcare. They should be able to get the help that they need, when they need it, in their own homes and communities.

Let us start with GPs. The Liberal Democrat manifesto—it was well received, which is why there are so many Members sitting behind me on these Benches—called for the right to see a GP within seven days or 24 hours if the situation is urgent, and for those aged over 70 or with a chronic health condition to have access to a named GP. Those rights are extremely important. People who go to the same GP for more than 15 years have a 25% lower chance of dying than those who have seen a new GP in the last year. Primary care networks tell me that their inability to deliver continuity of care because of the shortage of GPs is one of the problems that worry them most.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant introductory speech. Is she aware that perhaps only a third of those leaving medical school and seeking to go into general practice are able to find jobs, partly because the additional roles reimbursement scheme—which does exist—cannot be extended to enable some of those would-be GPs to be recruited? Is it not mad that although we are creating enough potential GPs through medical school, we cannot give them jobs because of the funding mechanisms that this Government inherited from the last one? We are losing them from general practice, and, in some instances, losing them from the country altogether.

[Helen Morgan]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. I believe that the Government are taking steps to address that, but he has made an important point about the need for flexible GP funding. A general practice may have money to spend on professionals and need more fully qualified doctors to deal with its patient list, but can only spend that money on another pharmacist or another nurse. That is a ridiculous situation, and I am pleased that the Government are dealing with it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that deeply tragic case. Words cannot express the heartbreak caused to Jamie Pearson’s friends and family. I hope it might be some small comfort to them to know that all acute hospitals should now have a 24/7 mental health liaison service in A&E, and we are looking at how best to take forward the Government’s suicide prevention strategy for England. We will do everything in our power to ensure that the tragic circumstances of Jamie’s untimely death are addressed, and that lessons are learned. I am happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss that further.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Those providing child and adolescent mental health services in south Cumbria do an outstanding job, but they are without a dedicated crisis team, unlike the rest of Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust. That is devastating and dangerous for my constituents. Will the Minister use his power to intervene with the integrated care board and Lancashire and South Cumbria to make sure that young people in our communities have access to a crisis team?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question and the passion with which he put it. We are committed to rolling out Young Futures hubs across the country and, of course, we need to prioritise areas of particular need. I would be happy to meet him to discuss that further.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I commend my hon. Friend and other east Lancashire colleagues for their campaigning on this matter. I look forward to the meeting we are going to have to discuss the performance of his local A&E, and I thank him very much for the invitation to visit.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I share an integrated care board with the hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham) in Lancashire and South Cumbria. Does the Minister agree that one reason why there are such problems with A&E waiting times is the congestion in our hospitals overall, because of the number of people who are healthy and fit to leave hospital, but cannot have a health and care plan when they return home? Some 24% of all beds in the Morecambe Bay hospitals are occupied by people who are fit to leave, but have no care package. What plan does the Minister have to address the social care crisis in Cumbria? That will include increasing the amount of affordable housing, so that people can afford to live in the area; paying carers more; and having more intelligent visa rules.

Hospice Funding

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sally-Ann Hart]

This is the point of the debate: to work out what sort of funding models we need. ICBs also need to be given the freedom to assess the priorities in their local areas, but I take that on board.

We have eight hospices across Sussex, and in 2019 seven of them formed the Sussex hospice collaborative—partnership working to ensure that the hospices’ combined resources can be used to maximise the impact, reach and cost-effectiveness of their activities. NHS Sussex works closely with that collaborative arrangement, which has supported the ability to have collective conversations. In January, the APPG on hospice and end of life care published a report on Government funding for hospices. The inquiry found that despite the introduction of a legal requirement for integrated care boards to commission palliative and end of life care, ICB commissioning of hospice services is currently not fit for purpose, and the value that hospices provide to individuals in the wider health system is at risk.

Hospice funding has historically not risen in line with inflation, which has been brought starkly to light during the periods of high inflation in recent years. Costs to keep palliative services running have increased rapidly over the past few years, but that is not reflected in the Government funding that hospices receive to deliver the services, which has increased by only 1% each year on average.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The hon. Member is being generous, and making an outstanding speech. I congratulate her on bringing this matter to the House. St Mary’s hospice, St John’s hospice and Eden Valley hospice, which serve the communities of Westmorland, struggle like others to find the funding that they need to keep going. One issue is increased pay settlements in the NHS, which are good, but to compete, and to get and retain staff, they need to raise their pay to keep pace. Does she agree that one model may well be that, rather than devolving this to ICBs, which are not elected and not directly accountable to anybody, the Government fund through the national health service pay rises at NHS pay rates directly to all our hospices, so they at least do not have to worry about that?

[Sally-Ann Hart]

The hon. Gentleman raises a valuable point, which I am sure the Minister will take onboard.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I thank my hon. Friend for his important question on concerns about the cost of care and how much it costs some people. As he may know—I remind him—the charging reforms were delayed in 2022 by the Chancellor after we listened to local authorities.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

A fifth of the social care roles in Westmorland and Furness are currently vacant and unfilled. Coincidentally that is the same proportion of beds in Morecambe Bay that are occupied by patients who are unable to get a care package and therefore leave hospital. The reasons for this are blindingly obvious: the pay and career structures are derisory for hard-working wonderful people and there is a complete absence of genuinely affordable homes for people in those sorts of roles to enable them to live locally. Does the Minister agree that fixing that crisis in my community and others should be the priority for the Chancellor tomorrow, not silly electoral gimmicks?

[Helen Whately]

I recognise the challenges in the hon. Gentleman’s area, although nationally vacancies in social care have fallen by over 20,000. We are reforming adult social care careers to make care a career for the UK workforce. We are putting extra funding into social care—up to £8.6 billion over two years—and introducing CQC assurance to make sure local authorities are doing their best on social care. I would encourage the hon. Gentleman to talk to his local authority and make sure it is paying a fair rate for the care it commissions.

Internationally Recruited Health and Social Care Staff: Employment Practices

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Hosie, and it is great to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). The right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) has made a great contribution to the House by securing this important debate and making his interesting opening speech.

The exploitation of workers, wherever they are from and whatever the circumstances, is unacceptable, and we should stand against it. Likewise, we should be deeply concerned about the state of social care in our country. The two things are clearly interlinked. The background, of which I am sure many Members will be aware, is a sharp rise in shortages in the social care workforce. That rise essentially followed from Brexit, but other issues will have led to that shrinking of the labour pool.

Perhaps understandably, the Government’s response in February 2022 was, among other things, to lower salary requirements and visa fees for migrant social care workers. That has had a significant impact on the numbers of people coming in on social care visas: there were 101,000 social care visas in 2022-23, up from 22,000 just the year before—a fourfold increase. As a result, vacancies have fallen. It does not feel like that in my part of the world, but the stats bear that out: there has been a reduction from 10.6% to 9.9% in 2023. The vacancy rate for the UK economy as a whole is 3.5%, so a bit of maths tells us that the vacancy rate in social care is getting on for three times above the national average. The increase in the number of care worker visas continues to accelerate, with 34,000 applications in quarter 3 last year.

One observation made by those who analyse the sector more scientifically—but it is my personal observation in my community as well—is that migrant workers are to a large degree replacing UK workers, who are moving to more attractive sectors. Incoming migrant workers are therefore not really filling gaps at all. Rather, they are filling additional gaps that British workers are vacating simply because care is not attractive financially or in other ways.

That highlights the big problem that is the source of all this. Social care is an utterly vital sector on which many of us depend, yet we pay a pittance to the people who lovingly and professionally care for the most vulnerable in our communities. They often have poor job security and poor working conditions, which of course impact on recruitment and retention. If this were improved, there is no doubt that we would secure more UK workers in the profession, and perhaps not put ourselves under pressure when it comes to the obvious issues of exploitation.

There was a debate in Westminster Hall this morning on hospitality and tourism. When people like me say that part of the answer is to have less restrictive visa rules for migrant labour, the Government say the answer is simply to pay British workers more. I would say to the Government, “Take your own advice.” Social care workers are paid a pittance because we underfund social care, so if the Government believe that is the way to ensure British people work in this sector, then pay them properly, and do not exploit people who come in from overseas either, because they are hugely valuable to what we are trying to achieve.

Exploitation should seriously worry us all. There are many pieces of evidence—the right hon. Member for Spelthorne set many of them out wisely and correctly—but one figure that really blew me away comes from the charity Unseen, the modern slavery and exploitation helpline. It reported a—wait for it—606% increase in the number of modern slavery cases in the care sector from 2021 to 2022. That is an absolutely astonishing increase.

As an adjunct, talking about migration policy is often emotive. Through the Government’s Illegal Migration Act 2023—it is the Act that is illegal, rather than the act of immigration—people arriving on our shores by irregular means will not have access to this country’s modern slavery provisions, unlike others. What will be the consequence? Many victims of modern slavery will not get the care they need. I also suspect that we will find that people will to our shores and simply not claim asylum, going under the radar, and that they will be exploited all the more outrageously.

Returning to the issue at hand, the director of labour market enforcement has identified adult social care as a high-risk sector for labour exploitation, with live-in and agency care workers believed to be at particular risk. Employers who are guilty of exploiting their staff are unlikely to demonstrate any better set of ethics towards the vulnerable residents who are also in their care. The increase in the salary threshold for skilled workers will not apply to those coming in on health and social care visas, yet people on those visas will, from 11 March, not be permitted to bring in dependants. That is a cruel and demoralising thing to do to people who we rely on to care for those we need the most. It is likely to lead to fewer applications, worse retention, and therefore a bigger problem for our social care sector.

In response to the vast increase in reports of exploitation of those on the health and social care visa, the Government have announced that care providers in England will be required to be regulated by the Care Quality Commission in order for them to sponsor visas. It is a good thing that care homes will have to be regulated by the CQC to sponsor migrant workers. My question for the Minister, however, is will they be required to have a minimum CQC inspection rating of good or outstanding before they are able to do so? Secondly, have any extra resources been provided to the CQC to enable them to undertake this role with the health and social care visa, given the additional effort it will involve? What powers will they have to enforce labour standards? Surely, due to the concerns raised, recruitment should only take place via agencies on the ethical recruiters list. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

We need to value care work, and we need to reflect that in the pay and conditions people receive. That includes treating migrant workers well. I reiterate that the decision to end their rights to have family with them is cruel and pointless, given that those people will not have recourse to public funds anyway. It is a cruel and almost performative piece of policy. It seems that the Government feel all the more inclined to give into the temptation to put silly populism and appeasing a small number of people out on the margins of the electorate ahead of governing wisely and compassionately. Whether I agree with the Government of the day or not, I always hope they will govern wisely and compassionately, yet this is another example of them failing to do that.

Labour market enforcement needs to be better resourced. It is important to establish a single enforcement body that is accessible to workers in practice and adequately funded, that is provided with robust enforcement powers, and that has secure reporting pathways. The Government must separate all labour market and immigration enforcement activity.

I have a few other thoughts about what else the Government ought to think about doing. The Health Foundation has suggested that we need to recognise that workforce planning must take account of the range of social care services and providers, as recruitment and retention can differ from place to place, and can vary considerably by care provider. For instance, places offering contract employment will find it hard to retain staff, and in some places the availability of public transport can have a massive impact on the retention of personal assistants. For those living in Cumbria, in Appleby, Ambleside or Arnside, the existence of the £2 bus fare is completely irrelevant if there ain’t no bus for them to use. That applies to people working in social care, but also to other parts of our community.

It is worthwhile getting to the very bottom of all this, which is the way we treat social care. Had we been living to the ages that we are now, when my late, great, right hon. Friend the noble Lord Beveridge wrote that important report in the 1940s, and if families had been as they are today, then I am sure social care would have been included in the national health service right from the beginning. Yet in the decades that have followed, we have attached it to the side of the health service, like a rickety lean-to. It is time we treated social care as we always should have: as integral to, and equal to, the national health service.

The situation is awful. What are the diseases we fear —those which, I guess, we fear more as we get older? Maybe the two main ones are dementia and cancer. But what a lottery: those with cancer at least get their care provided through the national health service, while those who end up with dementia are on their own and might lose absolutely everything. That is a nonsense. I want us to channel Beveridge and do what he would do today, which I am certain would be to ensure that social care workers are considered equal in value to those working in the health service, and are paid and treated accordingly.

That is why I think that free personal care is something the Government should consider seriously. I am very proud that the current Scottish Government maintain a policy that we introduced when we were in power alongside the Labour party in the ’90s and noughties. These issues are particularly relevant to communities such as mine. We are 10 years above the average age in Westmorland and Lonsdale. Our need for care is that much greater than in other parts of the country, and we value it hugely.

By the way, it is also vital that we value unpaid carers, who look after loved ones at great cost to themselves, and to whom we owe a huge debt. We should do more than just say thank you; we should change payments, benefits, and all sorts of other allowances that allow them to succeed. It was an honour for me to do the Great North Run last year, to raise funds for Carer Support South Lakes. Let us make sure we back those outfits that support our carers so well.

In conclusion, I am asking that we take the issue of exploitation seriously, that the Minister answers the questions that I and others have put to her today, and that we recognise that this is all a function of our failure to treat the labour market wisely and compassionately, and our failure to treat social care as we should. If we invested in social care properly and paid carers properly, the knock-on effect would be happier people who stayed in their positions, who were easier to recruit in the first place and who had career prospects. Those who are cared for would be happier and better cared for, and the pressure on our national health service would evaporate, or at least be alleviated, almost overnight.

In my communities in Morecambe bay and the rest of Cumbria, often more than 32% of the beds in our hospitals are occupied by people who are fit to leave, but for whom there is no care package to help them to leave. That has consequences for A&E waiting times, cancer waiting times and ambulance response times, and it is all down to the fact that no one has yet been brave and compassionate enough to tackle the care crisis meaningfully. I hope this Government will do, but if they do not, I am determined to play a part in doing just that in the next Parliament.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Maria Caulfield]

I thank my right hon. Friend and male colleagues on the Government Benches, including my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher), who are fighting so hard to improve men’s health. He is absolutely right: 12,000 men a year die from prostate cancer. That is why we are investing in the £16 million prostate cancer trial called Transform, using methods such as MRI to detect prostate cancer rather than PSA, which can be inaccurate. Thousands of men will be recruited. We are hoping that the trial will start in the spring, with recruitment in the autumn, including the recruitment of black men, who are disproportionately affected by prostate cancer.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Does the Minister agree, however, that the information she has just given about why screening for prostate cancer does not happen for men is based on a study that is 20 years old? There are 12,000 deaths a year—it is the biggest killer among men, and the second biggest killer among all people—yet here is this evil cancer for which there is no screening programme whatsoever. Will she take steps to update current NHS guidance to ensure that all those at high risk of prostate cancer receive a targeted early detection service? I think she has hinted that she may be doing that, but will she finally introduce mass screening for prostate cancer? It is the only cancer without specifically commissioned early diagnosis work, and men are dying unnecessarily because of the failure to bring this in.

[Maria Caulfield]

We have more than hinted: we have just announced a £16 million pilot study of prostate cancer screening. We have a plan to tackle those 12,000 deaths a year, and it will work, because until now we have not had a diagnostic test. PSA is not a sensitive test in all prostate cancers: there are many men with prostate cancer who do not express PSA. That is why the Transform study, using detection tools such as MRI, will be trialled, and if they are effective, such tools will be rolled out across the country.

NHS Dentistry

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I need hardly say that dentistry is not the only part of the national health service that the Conservative Government have allowed to fall into crisis while shamelessly seeking to shift the blame on to others. However, it is welcome that we have the chance to focus today on dentistry and on the millions of people in this country, including many thousands in Westmorland, who are being so badly let down.

For communities in Westmorland and Lonsdale, the heart of this crisis is a basic difficulty in securing an NHS appointment. Many people in our area know that they cannot afford to have their teeth or their children’s teeth checked. They feel a crushing financial burden, and a burden of guilt, because they cannot access an NHS dentist for themselves or their family, and they know that they cannot afford to go private.

This crisis has very real, very personal, very expensive and very painful consequences for people in our communities in Cumbria and nationwide. Healthwatch found that one in 10 people in England had resorted to paying for private dental care because they could not find an NHS dentist. However, most people I speak to cannot afford to go private, so what do those families do? Well, YouGov found that one in 10 adults had tried some form of DIY dentistry, the difficulty of accessing a dentist forcing them to resort to medieval practices. This country—proud of our prosperity and proud of our NHS—is in the shameful situation of its people’s teeth and, most shamefully of all, its children’s teeth, getting worse.

In 2022, the BDA found that one in four five-year-olds in my community in Cumbria had tooth decay, and that tooth decay was the No. 1 reason for hospital admissions among young people. Regular dental appointments are vital for preventing tooth decay, and even more so for children, whose teeth tend to decay more quickly. However, fewer and fewer children are able to access those appointments because of the negligence of this Government. In Cumbria, the proportion of children seen by a dentist in the NHS each year went from 64% in 2018 to just 50% last year, a drop of 14% in five years. Half of our children in our communities—from Grasmere to Grange, Appleby to Ambleside, Kendal to Kirkby Stephen and Windermere to Warcop—do not have access to an NHS dentist. That is a disgrace.

I have heard at first hand from my constituents about the shocking scale of the difficulty of getting access to appointments for children. One attendance officer at one of our primary schools wrote to me earlier last year after she found that families in her school were going abroad for dental appointments. She said:

“Tim, I felt compelled to email you to tell you… We have a high number of children who are regularly missing out on education due to being unable to register with a local NHS dentist. A large number of our children have Polish, Romanian, Latvian and Ukrainian parents and therefore will find it easier to travel back to their parents’ original home country rather than wait for a local NHS dentist who is accepting patients.”

Wow! Let us be clear: she is saying that some children in Cumbria find it easier to get dental treatment travelling to a war zone than to access the NHS dental care that their parents have already paid for through their taxes.

For adults in Cumbria, the picture is also awful. The number of adults seen by a dentist in the past two years is also down by 14%, to only 36.5%. Almost two thirds of adults in our communities in Cumbria cannot access the NHS dentists that—as I said—they have already paid for through their taxes. This is not only a crisis, but a colossal act of fraud and an injustice. People who work hard, pay their way, and rightly expect the Government to be competent enough to provide the services they have paid for are being let down, taken for a ride, and forced into either intense and painful physical suffering or paying again to get the treatment they were entitled to receive from the state. This is more than just a health issue; it is a moral issue, a fairness issue and a justice issue. A quick search of the NHS website shows that the nearest dental practice to Kendal that is taking on NHS patients is in Accrington, an 80-mile round trip, and that the nearest NHS practice to Kirkby Stephen is in Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, a round trip of two hours.

Let us remember that, as others have said, we are also facing a cancer care crisis in the UK, and part of the problem is a failure to diagnose cancers early so that they can be treated and cured. Dentists play a crucial role in identifying oral cancers, but if two thirds of Cumbria’s adults are not seeing an NHS dentist, we can be certain that cancers will be missed. They will therefore be untreatable and people will die unnecessarily. Core to our identity as Liberal Democrats is our belief that everyone in the UK should be able to access a dental health check-up on the NHS, with an emphasis on preventative oral health. We would reform the dental contract to ensure that those things take place, and fund it properly.

I am so often told by our local NHS ICB that, when all is said and done, the Government give them the money for only about half the people in our area to have access to an NHS dentist. Outrageously, that means that the only time they will contract a new NHS provider is when a previous provider has shut its doors, such as when the Avondale practice in Grange went private, leaving 5,000 people in limbo. People with a family of four faced a yearly fee of £1,000 just to stay on that practice’s books. I have proactively gone out to persuade private dentists to accept NHS work, and although I know it is only a sticking plaster, I reckon I could find more. However, the ICB will not take those dentists on because this Government will not let them. The dentistry crisis is an outrage—an injustice meted out to people and families across our area. It seems to us in Westmorland that the best way we will defeat that injustice is to defeat the Government who are responsible for it.

NHS Winter Update

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend sets out clearly the many pressures and factors at play in running emergency departments and hospitals at the best of times, when we are not in the middle of winter and facing the pressures that it always brings on the healthcare system. I thank not only staff in his trust, but staff throughout the country for the work they have done over recent weeks to support the NHS and to bring treatment to patients. We are working hand in glove with NHSE regional and local leaders to see whether there are practical measures that can be taken to improve the flow through hospitals.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

NHS winter pressures are having a huge impact on cancer surgery and other cancer interventions. In Cumbria, in the south of the county 25% of those with a cancer diagnosis are waiting more than two months for their first intervention, and in the north of the county 47% are waiting more than two months. We know that every month’s delay in treatment means a 10% reduction in people’s chances of surviving. Some 123 cancer operations have been cancelled in the last year in our area. One reason is the lack of investment by this Government, and their predecessors of all colours, in radiotherapy. Will the Secretary of State agree to meet me and Conservative and Labour members of the all-party parliamentary group for radiotherapy, which I chair, to look at solving the problem by investing in the kit that Britain desperately needs to save lives?

[Victoria Atkins]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will be interested to know that we have made cancer treatment waiting times a key focus of our elective recovery plan, which has been backed by an additional £8 billion in revenue funding across the spending review period. We have made progress by delivering record numbers of urgent cancer checks, with more than 2.9 million people seen in the 12 months to October last year. Of course there is more to do, and I would be very happy to meet him and colleagues across the House to discuss the practical ways by which treatment can reach our constituents. He will not be surprised to know that cancer is a priority not just for me personally, but for the Government as a whole.