Oral Answers to Questions

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jane Ellison]

My hon. Friend is quite right to highlight the number of people who will be affected by such diseases. There are between 6,000 and 8,000 rare diseases. Among the things that the Government are doing that will make a really big difference to some of the institutions that he mentioned and others, and particularly to sufferers, is the 100,000 genomes project, in which the Government have invested. The creation of a network of genetic medicine centres will underpin that further development of genetic testing services. As a very large proportion of rare diseases are genetically based, we want to make significant progress with that genomic work.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

5. What assessment he has made of the effect of changes to social care budgets on A&E attendances.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman)]

Our health and care system is under extraordinary rising demand from an ageing society. There are a million more pensioners this year than there were at the beginning of the previous Parliament, and there will be another million by the end of this Parliament. The number of adults needing care in the next 10 years will rise from 180,000 to 264,000. That is why integration of health and care is so important, and it is why I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced in the autumn statement £3.5 billion for social care by 2020 through the new adult precept and extra funding for the NHS five-year forward view.

[Christian Matheson]

In any given week at the Countess of Chester hospital, 70-plus elderly patients pitch up and cannot be discharged because care is not available elsewhere. We know that the Government broke their promise before the election to sort out funding for long-term care, and the King’s Fund recently said that the settlement to which the Minister refers will put

“even more pressure on … the NHS to pick up the pieces when there’s a breakdown in … care”.

Will the Minister now accept that that continuing neglect and those broken promises are the key cause of the crisis in our A&E departments?