NHS: Long-term Strategy

Debate between Alun Cairns and Wes Streeting

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House condemns the Government for failing to recognise the current crisis in the National Health Service; regrets that, as a result of Government mismanagement, hundreds of lives may be being lost every week due to the collapse of emergency care while patients are finding it impossible to get a GP appointment, ambulance or operation when they need one; calls on the Prime Minister to acknowledge the crisis and act with the necessary urgency to mitigate the impact on patients; and further calls on the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ensure the NHS is never in this situation again by bringing forward a long-term strategy which will end delayed hospital discharges, provide the NHS with the necessary staff to treat every patient in good time, and reform primary and community care to reduce the number of people needing hospital treatment.

I rise to support the national health service, which is going through the biggest crisis in its history, and most importantly, to defend the patients who are suffering as a direct result of 13 years of Conservative mismanagement of the NHS. This winter has shown just how high a price patients are paying: NHS staff are walking out on strike—in the case of nurses, for the first time in their history—patients are waiting entire days for an ambulance to arrive, and then days on end in A&E before they are admitted; there were 50,000 needless, preventable deaths last year, which experts have blamed on unacceptably long waiting times; and there have been hundreds of avoidable deaths every week this winter, because emergency care has collapsed.

The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care says that he disputes those figures from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Office for National Statistics, but I invite him to listen to some of the stories behind the numbers. An 89-year-old fell in the bathroom and waited nine hours for an ambulance. The sepsis that caused him to fall killed him. His consultant said:

“Had I seen him within a couple of hours it could have been avoided. Maybe.”

Teresa Simpson, a 54-year-old woman from Hull, suffered a cardiac arrest and lost oxygen supply to the brain. She waited 16 hours for an ambulance, which arrived only when her husband phoned 999 a second time, after she had become lifeless. She passed away. A consultant in the north of England described a scene in a hospital waiting room this winter when a patient collapsed:

“They get CPR on the floor. I am forced to declare his time of death in front of frightened, horrified members of the public and his wife. On the floor of the waiting room. He was elderly and frail and hadn’t wanted to bother us. We had run out of trolleys and beds. In the whole hospital. This was by 10am.”

The Prime Minister refuses to describe this as a crisis.

Our motion before the House calls for a long-term plan to end delayed discharges, give the NHS the staff it needs to treat patients on time, and reform primary and community care, so that fewer people end up in hospital.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Wes Streeting]

The Government do not have a plan, but perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will surprise me by telling me, against all hope and expectation, that they do.

[Alun Cairns]

Clearly, some of the statistics and cases that the hon. Member highlights are distressing and no doubt need to be investigated. The Prime Minister has rightly prioritised waiting times as one of his key commitments this year. How does the hon. Member account for the performance in Wales, which is worse than in England on all the statistics that we highlight, in spite of the Labour party having been in charge of the NHS there for more than 20 years?

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention, because it brings me directly to the Government’s amendment to the motion, which is not a plan but a litany of excuses for the situation across the United Kingdom, including in Wales. I will run through them. By way of excuse, they say that the situation is challenging across the United Kingdom, and they are right: in Wales, the NHS is struggling; in Scotland, the NHS is struggling; and in Northern Ireland, the NHS is struggling. What do all parts of the United Kingdom have in common? Thirteen years of Conservative underfunding.

I will tell the right hon. Gentleman that, as he knows perfectly well as a Welsh Member, the reason why the Welsh NHS struggles more than England overall is the age profile of the population, the number of disabled people in Wales and the level of deprivation. The same disparities between Wales and England overall also explain the enormous health inequalities within England, which is why health outcomes in my city—in London—are so much better than in so many parts of the north or south-west of England. And you know the way to deal with that? It is genuine levelling up. But if people want a Government who tackle health inequalities so that every person in every part of the United Kingdom gets good-quality healthcare, they need to elect a Labour Government here in Westminster. That is the truth that the right hon. Gentleman does not want to admit.

I know that SNP Members will not be here today, because we are talking about England, but here is another truth that Nicola Sturgeon does not want to admit either: people in Scotland will be better off under a Labour Government too. She knows that just as well as anyone else.

When Conservative Members are not talking about other parts of the United Kingdom, they say that health pressures exist right across the world, but international pressures do not explain why the average wait for an ambulance is 14 minutes in France, while heart attack victims and stroke victims routinely wait an hour for an ambulance here in England. International pressures do not explain why it is that, over the past year, one in six UK adults had a pressing need for medical examination or treatment but could not get access. They do not explain why this is the highest figure out of 36 European countries and almost triple the EU average. Their excuses about international pressures do not explain why cancer outcomes in England are behind other comparable countries. None of that explains why the state of the NHS is as bad as it is today, but perhaps the hon. Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans), who was trying to intervene, wants to stand up and justify why it is that, after 13 years of Conservative Government, his constituents are waiting an average of an hour for a heart attack or stroke case.