NHS Risk Register

Debate between Anna Soubry and Steve McCabe

Wednesday 22nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

It really does not matter what vote the Government Whips are able to secure tonight, because the truth is that the Government have lost the argument. The Secretary of State has squandered whatever political capital the Prime Minister was able to accumulate on the NHS and lost the trust and confidence of the public and professions with this Bill. There cannot be a single person in the country who does not understand that there is secret information, pertinent to the passage of the Bill, that he is determined to withhold from Parliament and the public. That is the position we are in.

The vote does not matter, but I would not like to be a Government Back Bencher having to go back and explain the matter to my constituents. I certainly would not like to be one of the Lib-Dem Members having to do so, because whatever the arguments and posturing here in the Chamber today, they will not cut any ice with a public who know that the facts are being withheld and feel they are being conned over a measure that they were promised would never be introduced by this Secretary of State.

I do not say this with any malice, but I think that it is too late to restore the Secretary of State’s reputation. Even at this late stage he could agree to release the information, but more importantly he should pause again and, this time, really listen to what people are saying about the NHS. He is probably not keen to take advice from me, but I have consulted my constituents in Selly Oak quite extensively on the Bill, and it is important that he knows that 76% of the people whom I consulted said that it is the wrong priority at the wrong time. Their concerns are about faster diagnosis and treatment and shorter waiting times.

The Secretary of State cited waiting times earlier in his speech, and he will know that the 18-week waiting time in south Birmingham is rising steadily. In fact, I think it has gone up—

[Anna Soubry]

You think?

[Steve McCabe]

Off the top of my head. I can check the figure, because the Secretary of State wants to be accurate, but I think it is 36%—since he became Secretary of State. It is going up, and he must know that, because he was quite happy to cite other figures earlier.

The money should be spent on reducing waiting times; it should not be withheld by the SHAs to cover the cost of the reorganisation. The Minister of State says that that is not happening, but his own operating framework shows perfectly well that that is exactly what the money is being withheld for. It is spelt out in black and white in his own documents, and that is what is wrong at the moment.

The public feel that waiting times are rising, they have difficulty accessing GPs and they are worried about the confusion surrounding the measure. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) said earlier, in some parts of the country it is already destabilising the NHS, but what we have today is the Government dismissing all those arguments while hiding behind a cloak, saying, “Everything’s going to be okay, but we’re not going to tell you the facts of the matter.” It is disgraceful, and the Secretary of State knows perfectly well that during the years that he spent in opposition he would never have tolerated such behaviour. His behaviour since taking office has been to undermine the NHS and to waste every bit of political capital that the Tory party accumulated during its years in opposition.

That is what is fundamentally wrong with the measure. It does not matter how many times people try to deal with the minutiae of the risk register; the reality is that the report is there and the information is there. There is only one person hiding it, and he is sitting opposite me on the Government Front Bench at the moment. That is what the public know. This is no longer an argument confined to what happens in this Chamber; it has gone way beyond that. It has got to the stage where the Secretary of State’s credibility is on the line, and I am afraid that it has been lost.