NHS Winter Pressures

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

My hon. Friend skilfully combines the importance of discharge at King’s Lynn with the importance of addressing RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete—hospitals, on which he has campaigned assiduously. As he will know from my speech at the NHS Providers conference, it is an issue that I very much recognise. I have visited the hospital and seen the challenges at first hand; indeed, my son was born in that hospital, so I know it very well. We are discussing that issue with the Treasury and I hope to be in a position to update the House shortly.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

We will not solve the NHS crisis without solving the NHS staffing crisis, which means sorting out pay. However, in talks with the unions today, the Government refused to make a new offer on pay. The unions say that the Secretary of State is ludicrously calling for—demanding—efficiency savings from nurses and other NHS staff. Many nurses and NHS staff are already working 18-hour shifts. When will the Government get real? When will the Government get serious? When will the Government make a proper offer to NHS staff to avoid strikes?

[Steve Barclay]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be quoting Onay Kasab, the lead national officer of Unite, who spoke to Sky News outside the Department of Health and Social Care just a few minutes after my discussions with the trade unions. The slightly odd thing was that Mr Kasab was not actually in the meeting on which he was commenting.

NHS Workforce

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

It has been interesting to hear the exchanges between the Front Bench speakers, although I am surprised that there are not more Members in the Chamber for what is a very important debate. [Interruption.] Actually, where are they on both sides of the House? Given that this is the No. 1 priority of the Opposition, where are they?

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Is it not the hon. Gentleman’s No. 1 priority?

[Steve Brine]

Without the heckling from the back row of the Labour Benches, I can say that this has always been my No. 1 priority.

Back in July, the Health and Social Care Committee, which I now chair, published a crucial report entitled, “Workforce: recruitment, training and retention in health and social care”—I urge colleagues across the House to take a look at it, if they have not already done so. We looked at workforce issues right across the NHS, and the findings were stark. The report found that the NHS workforce is facing the biggest challenge in its history. It made the same point about the social care workforce. Although social care is not the focus of today’s debate, it is important to stress, as others have during today’s opening exchanges, that the two sectors are closely intertwined and the workforce problems in the NHS cannot be considered in isolation.

We had NHS Providers before the Select Committee this morning to discuss the industrial action. I asked them whether they support the independent pay review process. I would have intervened on the shadow Secretary of State with that question, but his speech had already gone on for an hour, so I thought he deserved to sit down. More than 1 million NHS workers under Agenda for Change have had, as the Secretary of State said, a £1,400 pay rise this year. That has come out of the independent pay review process. The question I asked NHS Providers this morning, to which the answer was yes, was: do they still believe in the independent pay review process?

Either we have that process, we believe in it and we respect it, or we do not. Are we saying that we have that process and it sticks until something else comes along? If Ministers then become directly involved in negotiating pay for NHS workers, that is a very different proposition. That is not the place we want to be, although the Select Committee is very happy to scrutinise that proposal if it is coming from the Treasury Bench. I would be interested to hear in the winding-up speeches what the Labour party’s position is on the independent pay review process, because it is independent for a reason.

The Committee’s report cited research by the Nuffield Trust suggesting that the NHS in England could be short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives. The number of people on a waiting list for treatment rose to a record of just over 7 million in September, and the 18-week target for treatment has not been met, as is well known and is on the record, since 2016. Yet, as our report noted, the demand on the sector continues to grow relentlessly. There are estimates that an extra 475,000 jobs will be needed in health by the early part of the next decade.

One of the Committee’s most urgent recommendations was that the Government should do proper workforce planning. We noted that without workforce plans that are independently verified and publicly available, there would be little confidence among the public, the profession or NHS workers themselves that the Government have a grip on the problem.

I must say that the Select Committee has not yet had a Government response to our workforce report—it is a little overdue. The Secretary of State is on the Front Bench, and I know he is busy, but hopefully he will take that back to his officials. We look forward to receiving that response, because it is important that Select Committees get responses to reports in as timely a manner as possible, notwithstanding the fact that there has been a change of Administration.

However, I am encouraged that the Government are paying attention to what the Committee recommended, and I was delighted to hear my predecessor in this role, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, say in his autumn statement that he agreed with himself—his words—and that the Government would now be publishing an independently verified workforce plan for the NHS for the next five, 10 and 15 years, something the Committee has long called for. The Treasury outlined that the plan would

“include measures to make the best use of training to get doctors, nurses and allied health professionals into the workforce, increase workforce productivity and retention.”

Excellent—that is progress.

Questions remain, however—maybe the Minister can touch on this in her winding-up speech—about what the independent workforce planning will look like in practice. We need to know more about who will provide the independent verification once the work has been done. I understand the work has largely been done by the NHS, but we need to know who will be doing the independent verification, when it will be published and how regularly it will be reviewed. When we know that, we will look forward to talking to him or her in the Select Committee.

Our report contained a number of other important and detailed recommendations about how to tackle the NHS workforce crisis. I do not want to go into all of them today—as I have said, the report is on the record and published in the House—but among them I wanted to highlight the radical review of working conditions that was touched on by both the shadow Secretary of State and the Secretary of State.

Work conditions are critical. We talked about the need to reduce the intensity of work felt by so many people in the service—which I hear about both as a constituency MP and as Chair of the Select Committee—and the need to boost retention and of course recruitment of people who are looking at where they might work when they have done training. We recommended that the review should start with an overhaul of flexible working, which would mean that NHS workers were not driven to join agencies or become locums to gain control over their working lives. I often hear those words, “We just need control over our working lives.”

We also said it is a huge problem that senior doctors are being forced to reduce their working contribution to the NHS or to leave it entirely because of the long-standing problem around pension arrangements, which was a problem when I was a Minister in the Department. We accept that the Government have made some progress on pensions, with changes to the taper rate and the annual allowance, and credit to them for that, but we note that the problem persists and have called on the Government in our workforce report to address it.

In that context, to give credit where it is due, I was very pleased to see on Monday that the Government have announced plans to amend NHS pension rules to retain senior doctors and encourage staff to return from retirement. The Secretary of State was slightly mocked when he said that was subject to a consultation, but that is how government works. If the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) were to become Secretary of State—I like him very much, but I hope he does not—he would also publish consultations, because that is how proper government is done, and he knows that. We look forward to seeing the Government response to that consultation, which I know the Secretary of State is keeping a keen eye on

The Secretary of State is right to say that there are a record number of doctors in training, with five new medical schools, two of them focused on training GPs. That is true, but the Select Committee will return to our workforce work next year, and we will be taking evidence from anyone who wishes to contribute about the cap on training places. I have said to Ministers and to No. 10 that I think the Government are going to have to look again at that issue. I hear in my constituency from bright young boys and girls who wish to train as medics, whose parents have maybe worked in the profession and who have that ambition for themselves. The cap is a problem.

My other point is about demand. We had somebody from the British Medical Association’s GP committee before the Select Committee this morning, as part of our ongoing inquiry into integrated care systems, who was talking about the NHS being underfunded. That depends on which end of the lens we look at, does it not? We spend £150 billion or so of taxpayers’ money on the NHS. We could spend £300 million; that would be a choice. We would have to fund it, of course, because we know what happens when people make unfunded spending pledges from the Dispatch Box—the markets go into meltdown, and rightly so.

We need to have a serious and honest conversation with ourselves about how much of our national wealth we wish to spend on our health service and whether that would achieve the desired outcomes. We are the fifth-largest spender on health services in the OECD, but we do not get the fifth-best outcomes. I can give the House a bit of an exclusive here, because in the new year the Select Committee will be launching a big inquiry into prevention. Anyone who knew me when I stood at the Dispatch Box as a Minister will know that cancer and prevention are the two things that most get me out of bed in the morning, so we will do a big piece of work on prevention.

My view and the view of many others is that the NHS will have long-term sustainability challenges if we do not get serious about prevention. I do not just mean returning to the argument around obesity and all the things I wrote about in the child obesity plan when I was a Health Minister, although they are important and I urge the Government not to backtrack on any of those policies but to implement them, because weight is a major problem in our ill health. We need to get upstream of ill health.

I will say more about this in the debate in the House on Thursday, but when the Committee returns to cancer work, we must look at future cancer and at getting upstream of cancers. At the moment, we want to diagnose quickly, but people have to have symptoms in order to be diagnosed quickly and then we need to treat very quickly as well, within the 28-day standard. The Secretary of State and I have talked several times already about how we need to get far ahead of that.

We need to bring together predictive medicines, biomarkers and some of the life sciences work that is going on with the NHS’s genomic strategy, and get ahead of some of the illnesses that drive ill health in our country. Without that, in my humble opinion, the NHS has long-term sustainability problems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Just two years ago, in the middle of the greatest public health crisis in decades, millions of people came out to clap for the nurses, doctors and other NHS workers who were putting their lives on the line to save the lives of others. As people will remember, Conservative Members were only too happy to be seen joining in the applause. How times have changed.

We now have Tory Ministers wheeled out on the media to attack those same NHS workers with sick claims that their planned action for fair pay is aiding Putin’s abhorrent war on Ukraine. Those disgraceful remarks appear to be the opening salvo in a Tory propaganda war that seeks to blame NHS workers for the deep crisis in our health service. The Tories will attack nurses, as they do every other worker forced to defend their pay and conditions. But nurses did not create the NHS staffing crisis. Nurses did not create record NHS waiting lists. Nurses did not underfund our NHS. Nurses did not hand tens of billions of pounds that should have gone to the NHS over to the private sector, including in corrupt contracts. Whoever the Tories try to blame, the simple truth is this: it is 12 years of Conservative party rule that has created the crisis in our NHS.

At its core is a crisis in the NHS workforce, with workforce shortages at an unprecedented level across the NHS. The statistics are eye-watering, with 133,000 NHS vacancies in England alone and a record high of 47,000 nursing vacancies. This Tory-created staffing crisis is why patients are struggling to get a GP appointment, why heart attack patients face ambulance waiting times of more than an hour and why many are not getting the life-changing operations they urgently need.

Today we will vote on an important policy to scrap the non-dom tax status that is exploited by the super-rich to avoid £3.2 billion in taxes every year. Scrapping that, as Labour advocates, could fund a long-term plan to train enough NHS staff. For example, it could double the number of medical training places and deliver 10,000 more nursing placements.

The Tories should back that plan to put the NHS before non-doms and invest in our NHS instead of lining the pockets of the super-rich. It is a plan that would help bring about a long-term solution to this crisis. For the next two years that they are in government—that is all it will be—they should take the action needed to address the workforce crisis in the immediate term, and we cannot solve that unless we resolve the NHS pay crisis.

A third of public sector workers are actively considering leaving their jobs, and pay is a key factor in that. Key workers in our NHS still earn thousands of pounds a year less in real terms than in 2010. For example, nurses’ real pay is down by £5,200 compared with 2010, while hospital porters’ real pay is down by £2,500. Now the Government expect it to fall even further.

Staff, however much they love their jobs, simply cannot afford to stay in them. Their pay is not covering their essentials. Hospitals are even having to open up food banks for staff. That falling pay is why, over the coming weeks, nursing staff and—it was announced today—ambulance staff will be taking industrial action. Nursing staff do not want to take action, but they feel they have been left with no choice because Government Ministers will not even meet them to discuss pay.

Nurses hope that the Government will listen and open up the pay talks so that they do not have to go out on strike, but if they do strike, they will have public support and I will go and support them. It is not too late for the Government to avoid strikes. They have chosen strikes over negotiations, but they can stop this at any point. The Government need to open up the talks and they need to pay NHS workers properly. They need to give NHS workers the pay rise they deserve.

Baby Loss and Safe Staffing in Maternity Care

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) on securing the debate, and on the candour and bravery with which she spoke from personal experience. I will use the limited time available to me to share the experience of my constituents, Hayley Storrs and Reece Watson, who wrote to me as follows:

“My name is Hayley Storrs & my partners name is Reece Watson. I’m 33 years old & live in Leeds. I work for NHS England as a Care Manager & my partner as an Electrical Engineer.

In October 2021, after a low risk pregnancy our first baby Ollie James Watson, passed away following a placenta abruption at 40 weeks & 5 days gestation. After suffering a haemorrhage at home, we were kept waiting at Calderdale Hospital in an understaffed Maternity Assessment unit, with bleeding & in active labour for over 1 hour before being seen by a midwife.

My son had already passed away inside my tummy & I wasn’t aware. Following his death & traumatic labour where I suffered a post partum haemorrhage, we received no bereavement support from the trust aside from a postcard on his 1st birthday.

The labour ward was short staffed when Ollie was born & I was left alone on numerous occasions with internal bleeding & no pain relief due to staff shortages. We have since learned that had a simple doppler scan been undertaken at any time during my pregnancy Ollie could have been saved. As a result of our experience, I suffered from PTSD, Birth Trauma, depression & severe anxiety, which still impact my day to day life.

Sands were an incredible support to me during the darkest days of my grief, when I wasn’t sure I would survive without Ollie. They provided information, comfort, support & a listening ear when I needed it the most. I attended a local support group which helped me connect with other women in similar situations to ours & made me feel less alone.

What people fail to understand when someone loses a child, it is that you have lost a lifetime. First days at school, first steps, graduations, what their favourite story would have been, birthdays, Christmases. Instead we walk out of a hospital with empty arms & into a world of grief & loss we are not equipped to navigate. My son deserved better than a memory box of scan photos, he deserved to live.

Please listen to us when we say that enough is enough, ask yourselves the question what will it take for change to happen? How many more babies like ours will die before something is done? How many more bereaved parents will it take to campaign for better, safer maternity care for you to take notice? How many more government enquiries will it take for someone to stand up & say ‘we see you, we hear you & we stand with you’?

In loving memory of Ollie James Watson, and all of the babies who never made it home. You will never be forgotten.”

Those are the words of Hayley Storrs, Ollie’s mum, from the constituency of Leeds East. I share them because to put on record Hayley’s and Rhys’s experience. Although I have not experienced baby loss myself, I think it is important that hon. Members who have personal experience share their experiences, that other Members share our constituents’ experiences, as I have done, and that we all come together on a cross-party basis really to address the issue.

This incredibly important debate has shown what can be done when we come together. I congratulate every Member who has spoken bravely about their personal experience, particularly the hon. Member for Hartlepool, who secured the debate and opened it in such an illuminating, informative and brave way.

Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point and some good suggestions. West Midlands ambulance service is my local ambulance service too, and I recently met its chief executive officer and chairwoman. As he knows, the NHS has published and is executing a 10-point plan for emergency service recovery, but I shall certainly take what he says into account.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

T5.   Increasingly, hospitals have food banks to help NHS staff to cope with the cost of living crisis. Is it any wonder that the number of nurses leaving the NHS is at its highest for years? After a decade of pay cuts, will not yet another below-inflation pay award mean that even more nurses leave, which will have a hugely detrimental impact on patient care?

[Sajid Javid]

I am pleased to say that we have more nurses working for the NHS than at any point in its history, and last year we recruited an additional 10,900.

Childhood Cancer Outcomes

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing the debate. I have been receiving emails during the debate from constituents who are delighted that this important subject is being discussed.

I want to pay tribute to a family in my constituency—to John and Hayley McGee and their incredible, inspirational daughter Elsa, who sadly passed away from childhood cancer. This is how they explained their journey:

“We sailed through the initial treatment and naively believed we were the fortunate ones. Elsa hated everything about chemotherapy, hair loss, lack of taste but most of all the lack of control. Her strong, sassy and sometimes aggressive attitude is what kept us all from falling. She was determined not to let this get her down. Our beautiful girl had no desire to be a girly girl but just to be accepted, hair or no hair. With a personality that always left a huge Elsa sized impression on the hearts she touched, she will be missed by many.”

When John and Hayley were asked what changes they would like to see, they said they would like:

“More involvement from the government with better funding for children’s cancer research. New, less aggressive treatments and most importantly, a cure.”

They also pointed out the fact that only 3% of cancer spend is going into researching childhood cancers.

Another constituent has been in touch with me as well. Natalie has talked to me about the experience of a child close to her, Jack, and she has three demands that she wants me to register in this debate. First, there is a need for biobanking all childhood tumours for genomic sequencing. Secondly, we need dedicated funding for childhood cancer research and treatments. Thirdly, she asked me to register a point that we have already heard today, namely that childhood cancer should be treated differently from adult cancer in diagnosis, in treatment pathways and in support services.

In the debate today, we have heard the unimaginable—for those who have not been through them—difficulties that families have gone through when their child has been diagnosed with cancer, treated for cancer, and all too often died from cancer. This debate is incredibly important as we look forward to giving people hope. The hon. Member for Gosport deserves real congratulations, as does everyone who has worked to bring this crucial issue to the House today, and we have seen the unity for a better future for all those diagnosed with childhood cancer and for their families.

Future of the NHS

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Gray, and it is wonderful to hear all these passionate speeches today. We need to be clear that whether they admit it or not, the Conservatives have always had a problem with the national health service. They might try to rewrite the history books, but the truth is recorded: they voted against the creation of our national health service on more than 20 occasions, and the reason is purely ideological. They see it as an unwelcome intervention into the market, a point I will return to in a second.

Some of the more vocal supporters of that neoliberal agenda see the NHS as a last bastion of socialism in our society. I am proud that our national health service was created by socialists, and I think it is the greatest example in this country’s history of socialist principles put into practice. What does that mean? It means that there are some things in life more important than the pursuit of profit. However, what we now see—what we have seen since 2010—is an increased drive for the Americanisation of our national health service. The Conservatives want to turn it into a system where they feel for a patient’s wallet before they feel for their pulse. The truth is that however the history books are rewritten, it was a struggle to create the NHS in the first place, and it is now a great struggle to maintain it in accordance with its founding principles.

There are two key issues for our health service—deep underfunding and greater use of the private sector—and they go hand in hand, with the national health service being underfunded so that people can supposedly be persuaded to stomach greater and greater private sector involvement. First, the Conservatives defund things so that people get frustrated, and then they say that there is no choice but to hand them over to the private sector—that is the plan. We hear from the Conservatives that the staffing crisis in our national health service was caused by omicron or by covid, but the truth is that the huge vacancies and understaffing in the NHS did not start with omicron or with covid: the vacancies have been there for a long time, and now there are nearly 100,000 of them. An unbelievable £100 billion has gone to non-NHS providers of healthcare over the past decade alone. Every pound spent bolstering the private companies means less spent on people’s healthcare, as the profits are creamed off.

People out there are right to be worried about what the Conservatives want to do with the NHS. I mentioned earlier the Conservatives’ historical and ongoing objection to interventions in the market, but the truth is they believe in free markets for the 99%—with all the harm it brings them in their lives, their pay packets and their health service—but believe in intervention in the market for the benefit of those at the top. That is what we saw during the covid crisis, with all those corrupt contracts, the VIP fast-track lane, and billions of pounds going to Serco for the failed test and trace system. What the Tories did with the corrupt covid contracts, they want to do right across our national health service. That is why the Health and Care Bill would be better renamed the corporate takeover Bill. We cannot allow that to happen. The Conservatives want to create a race to the bottom, and we know that cuts and privatisation go hand in hand.

Before I finish, I will say a word about our NHS staff. We saw the Prime Minister—who no one trusts anymore, and quite rightly so—standing outside Downing Street clapping for the NHS heroes, but claps do not pay the bills. If we have a Government that values NHS staff in the way they say they do, they need to pay those staff properly. I put on the record my support for the 15% pay increase for NHS staff, who have suffered a decade of real-terms pay cuts. We need to be clear about what that means: that 15% increase would bring their pay back in line with where it was a decade ago.

What is the way forward? It is for us to realise that no Prime Minister or Government will say to the public, “Do you know what? We’re going to privatise the NHS. Do you know what? We’re going to turn it into an American-style healthcare system.” Of course they will not do that. They will manufacture consent for those changes through underfunding and through creeping privatisation carrying on at ever greater pace. It was a struggle to create our NHS, and it will be a struggle to save it from this final Americanisation. Regardless of which party we are in, history will judge us poorly if we betray those who went before us and created our national health service—the greatest achievement in our country’s history, and the greatest example of socialist principles put into practice, which may be why this Government dislike it so much.

Public Health

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

What I can tell my right hon. Friend is that there are approximately 6,000 people in English hospitals who have tested positive for covid, and of those—I have shared information like this with the House before, because I was determined to obtain it when I first became Health Secretary—approximately 80% are there because of covid symptoms, while about a fifth are there for other reasons, but were tested for covid and happened to have it. I hope that that is helpful to my right hon. Friend.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I really must press the Secretary of State on this issue, on behalf of workers in my constituency and across the country, particularly low-paid workers. Why are the Government not offering us a vote today on whether to increase sick pay to real living wage levels? We cannot have a situation in which the Government are making the case that this matter is so serious—which it is—while forcing low-paid workers to choose between food on the table and self-isolating to protect the rest of the community.

[Sajid Javid]

Where I agree with the hon. Gentleman is on the importance of using measures to support people. Support is already there, but I recognise from the way in which he phrased his question that he thinks there should be more support. I understand that we have a difference of view on that, but it is something we keep under review.

When I announced our autumn and winter plan to the House in September, I explained that we would hold measures in reserve in case the NHS was likely to come under unsustainable pressure and stop being able to provide the treatment that we want all our constituents to receive. Yesterday NHS England announced that it would return to its highest level of emergency preparedness, incident level 4, and unfortunately there is now a real risk that the exponential rise in omicron cases will translate into a spike in hospital admissions and threaten to overwhelm the NHS.

We have done so much to boost the capacity of the NHS. Over the past year we have increased the number of doctors by 5,000 and the number of nurses by almost 10,000, and we have expanded the number of beds available, but we have also had to put in place measures for infection control which have limited that capacity, and there are already more than 6,000 covid-19 patients in hospital beds in England.

Despite the progress that we have made, the NHS will never have an unlimited number of beds, or an unlimited number of people to look after people in those beds. If we think that capacity risks being breached, we simply have to step in, because we know what that would mean in practice for both covid and non-covid care. It would mean one of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents, maybe a child, is in a car crash and is in need of emergency care, and the NHS has to make difficult decisions about who deserves treatment and who does not. Now, I know that some hon. Members think that this is merely hypothetical, but it is not. We have seen health services around the world become overwhelmed by covid-19 and we cannot allow that to happen here.

Health and Care Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

The Health and Care Bill is deeply problematic. I want to focus on two issues that, when combined, mean that it is a complete disaster. It not only makes it easier for private health giants to profit from the national health service; it also makes a charter for corruption because it opens the door to even greater private sector involvement in our NHS. That is why this Bill should really be called the NHS corporate takeover Bill. For example, it allows private corporations to sit on health boards, which make critical decisions about NHS budgets and services, and the Government’s amendment 25 does not go nearly far enough.

Even before this Bill, an unbelievable £100 billion has gone to non-NHS providers of healthcare over the past decade alone, and earlier this year half a million patients have had their GP services quietly passed into the hands of a US health insurance giant. This Bill would lock in yet more privatisation in future, with even less scrutiny, because it means less transparency. It means private health giants getting an even bigger slice of the action with less scrutiny.

[Dr Poulter]

I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a practising NHS doctor. On the issue of private healthcare provision, the hon. Gentleman will recognise that GPs are in fact small businesses in their own right, and some of them quite large businesses. How does he equate the role of the GP as a small business in the context of his concerns about private healthcare?

[Richard Burgon]

We are not seeking to wage war on GPs; we want to support GPs and properly resource them. We see so many GPs retiring and not being replaced. It is this Government who are waging war on our NHS with this further Americanisation of our NHS. It is a dangerous cocktail where the dodgy contracts we have seen throughout covid risk becoming the norm. The billions squandered on test and trace should serve as a warning of what the Government could do to the whole of our NHS.

There is a sleight of hand going on with this Bill. It is true that under the Bill NHS bodies will no longer have to put services out to competitive tender to the private sector. Such tendering to the private sector was made a requirement under section 75 of the coalition Government’s Health and Social Care Act 2012. It was a shameful Act and its scrapping has long been demanded by those opposed to privatisation of our national health service. However, the change in this Bill does not reverse privatisation, because without making the NHS the default provider, that simply means that contracts can not only still go to private healthcare corporations but can do so without other bids having to have been considered.

To prevent all this, I tabled amendment 9, which I want to put to a vote—unless of course the Government accept it—because it establishes the NHS as the default option. [Interruption.] Conservative Members groan, but the only reason for people not to support my amendment is if they do not believe in the NHS not moving to a privatised insurance model. Why else would people object to the NHS being the default provider of healthcare? The British Medical Association supports it, so the Tory groans are groans against the position of the British Medical Association. Unison supports it, so the Tory groans are groans against the voices of those who work in the NHS—for most of whom, if they need to have more than one job, it is because they do not get paid enough, not because they are trying to get their own snouts in the trough. I will be voting against the whole Bill, but if the Government refuse to accept amendment 9 to make the NHS the default provider, that shows what the Government of the party that objected to the foundation of the NHS in the first place are really up to, despite all the warm words.

[Mel Stride]

I rise to speak to new clause 49. In doing so, and whatever its merits or otherwise, it is worth reflecting on the comments made by the Minister that we are at least here this evening looking at a part of a process that will lead to some progress in meeting social care costs going forward and removing the catastrophic risk that has hung above the heads of all our constituents up and down the country: that their healthcare costs may end up costing them all of their assets. We are also here having taken the tough decisions around having raised taxes to fund those arrangements.

I have problems with new clause 49. It seems to me that to make good law in this place, first, we need time to consider the matters put before us and secondly, we need the appropriate information upon which to take those decisions. On both those points, I have real concerns about how new clause 49 has been brought forward. The first we heard of it was not in Committee or in September when the general measures were put forward, including the taxation measures on which we all divided and voted, but on Wednesday evening, when the amendment was tabled.

It was fortuitous that the Treasury Committee happened to have Sir Andrew Dilnot before us the very next day. We were able to discuss many of the issues inherent in new clause 49. A number of issues were raised, to which only the Government have the answers. One of them has been put forward powerfully by speaker after speaker tonight, which is: what are the impact assessments associated with these measures? I wrote to the Chancellor immediately after that session and asked him for some impact assessments, including geographical impact assessments, of which we have had none.

It seems that the only information we have had was released by the Department of Health and Social Care on Friday night, in a document called “Adult social care charging reform: analysis”. I am very short of time, which is a shame, but there is, for example, a chart of a 10-year care journey that looks at individuals with different asset levels. While it is true, as my hon. Friend the Minister said, that these arrangements, even with new clause 49, are better for almost every level of wealth than under the status quo, it is not the case that everybody is better off compared with the measures brought forward in September.

Covid-19: Government Response

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

The Government have a range of measures. We have vaccines; we are world leading on antivirals; and we have lots of other measures. As I go about my constituency, I see many people blipping into venues, wearing their face coverings when they are shopping and lots of different things. It is important that people have that choice and make decisions based on the current circumstances.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Low-paid frontline workers without access to decent sick pay have been most likely to lose their lives during the crisis. Is it not those workers who will pay the price for this complacency?

[Maggie Throup]

The Government have been extremely generous in their support throughout this pandemic and will continue to be so.

Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No. 3)

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

We need to have a frank and honest discussion about where we are on covid. It is now clear that the Government’s covid strategy is again going badly wrong with fatal consequences.

We need to be clear that our country currently has the world’s second highest number of new cases and the world’s second highest number of hospitalisations. At the start of this month, more than 200,000 pupils were off school due to covid. Even on the vaccines roll-out, we are falling behind: we have slipped to around 12th best in Europe. Over the past month, there have been double the number of deaths compared with the same time last year. Most worryingly, the current rate of daily deaths would amount to 40,000 deaths per year.

We should be in no doubt that many of those deaths are avoidable. People are dying as a direct result of the Government’s refusal to implement basic public health measures. I am talking about not lockdowns, but the kind of measures that are normal in many other countries. We are not doing them because the Government want to pretend that they can draw a line under covid, but we cannot just wish it away.

Where is the plan to require masks on public transport and in shops? Where is the plan for sick pay at real living wage levels? Where is the plan to tackle high infection rates in schools with the simple measures being asked for by the teaching unions and parents? Where is the plan, more than 20 months on from the start of the pandemic, to give people proper sick pay, as I said, so they are not forced into work when they are ill? Getting those basics right now could still save thousands of lives. We know that because the Government’s own scientists have said so. The Government have a moral duty to act, but instead they are sleepwalking into another deadly winter.

Some of the measures being debated today for the renewal of the powers of the Coronavirus Act are needed, but most of what we are discussing is irrelevant to the debate we need to have to tackle high cases as we go into winter. The Government are not giving MPs the opportunity to debate the wider public health measures that we urgently need. For that reason, I will not be supporting the Government in any vote today.

Time and again during the pandemic, the Government have acted late, and have cost lives by doing so. I urge them to act now and bring in the simple measures that we know can make a difference and save lives, which are masks on public transport and in shops, better ventilation in workplaces, a strategy for tackling high infection rates in schools, and sick pay at real living wage levels for all who need it.