Diane Abbott
Main Page: Diane Abbott (Independent - Hackney North and Stoke Newington)Department Debates - View all Diane Abbott's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House notes that the Vote Leave group during the EU referendum campaign claimed that an extra £350 million a week could be spent on the NHS in lieu of the UK’s EU membership contribution; further notes that senior figures who campaigned, including the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire, the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and the Rt hon. Member for Surrey Heath have subsequently distanced themselves from that claim; and calls on the Government to set out proposals for additional NHS funding, as suggested by the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire on 4 July 2016.
It is a pleasure once again to face the Secretary of State for Health.
Nobody can doubt that much of the case that was made by the Vote Leave EU campaign was based on assertions that have since crumbled. For instance, within hours of the vote to leave the European Union, the Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, said that taking back control of immigration did not necessarily mean cutting it. That will have been news to millions of people who voted to leave.
We also heard that there was no hurry to get on with leaving the EU. Why then the urgency of the campaign? The most striking reversal of all came from Nigel Farage. Within hours of the vote, he said that it was a mistake for the Vote Leave campaign to claim that leaving the EU would mean £350 million a week more for the NHS. Some of us were surprised by that, because this was no ordinary campaign slogan; it was painted on the side of the Vote Leave battle bus, which travelled thousands of miles up and down the country. It was emblazoned on the backdrop to speeches by the luminaries of the Vote Leave campaign. The British public is entitled to ask: where is the £350 million a week and when can we expect to see the Government start pumping that new money into our NHS? We all know about the financial and other pressures already facing the NHS.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend not think the public are also entitled to ask where the serried ranks of leave campaigners are today?
Ms Abbott
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I do not see a single solitary leave campaigner in the Chamber this evening. It makes me wonder what the whole campaign was about. Was it about their egos? Was it some elaborate Eton wall game? Are they not concerned that the public may have been misled?
As I was saying, we know about the financial pressures already facing the NHS. A survey by the Healthcare Financial Management Association of 200 NHS finance directors in hospitals and clinical commissioning groups reveals that no fewer than one in five believe that the quality of care will worsen in 2016-17, and even more of them—one in three—fear that care will deteriorate in 2017-18 as a result of financial pressures. Waiting times, access to services and the range of services offered were seen to be among the most vulnerable areas. There is no doubt that those pressures will be made worse when we leave the European Union.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend most warmly on her appointment as the shadow Secretary of State for Health. We miss her on the Back Benches, but we are delighted that she has reached the dizzy heights of the shadow Cabinet.
One place where we are feeling the pinch is in diabetes. We have had a number of reports that the DESMOND and DAFNE—diabetes education and self-management for ongoing and newly diagnosed, and dose adjustment for normal eating—schemes to provide structured education for type 1 and type 2 diabetics, are being cut. Does my hon. Friend agree that prevention is so important that we should ring-fence resources to deal with the crisis affecting diabetics?
Ms Abbott
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for making that important point. We are seeing pressures on public health services and expenditure across the piece. What he says about ring-fencing money for diabetes is very important and I support him.
The Health Foundation think-tank says that
“Leading economists are…unanimous in concluding that leaving the EU will have a negative effect on the UK economy”.
As a result, the NHS budget could be fully £2.8 billion lower than currently planned by 2019-20. In the longer term, the NHS funding shortfall could be at least £19 billion by 2039, equivalent to £365 million a week—and that assumes that the UK is able to join the European economic area. If that does not happen, the shortfall could be as high as £28 billion, or £540 million a week.
Those figures are not just numbers in a ledger. We know what poor care means in practice. Today’s Care Quality Commission report on North Middlesex University Hospital revealed a series of terrible incidents: an evening when only one commode was available for more than 100 patients; a patient left sitting on a bedpan for more than an hour; and a patient who lay dead in A&E for four and a half hours before being found. We can foresee similar consequences in other hospitals if pressures bear down on the NHS budget, not only because of all sorts of externalities, but because of our leaving the EU.
We know about the endemic problems in the NHS. Earlier today, we discussed the junior doctors rejection of the Government’s new contracts. We know that nurses and midwives are in uproar because of the Government’s plan to scrap the bursaries that would-be nurses and midwives rely on when they are studying. A fresh injection of cash, as promised by the Vote Leave campaign, could not be more timely.
While we are talking about the implications of Brexit for the NHS, I remind Members that any restrictions on freedom of movement—a subject that is being discussed extensively in the wake of the Brexit vote—will be little less than disastrous for the NHS; 55,000 men and women in its workforce originate from the EU. It would be completely catastrophic for social care; 80,000 men and women out of 1.3 million workers in that field are EU nationals.
I represent a constituency that voted strongly for remain—I think that Hackney had the second highest remain vote in the country—and I believed that a remain vote was in the best interests of the UK, but as we heard earlier today in the House, there has been a horrifying upsurge in racist abuse and hate crime, triggered by the Brexit vote. It is as if people now have permission to be openly racist. It is interesting that Vote Leave supporters are now distancing themselves from anti-immigrant politics, but the unpleasantness unleashed by the Brexit campaign is already poisoning public discourse. However, I believe strongly in democracy, so I believe that we have to respect the referendum vote. In many cases, it was a cry of pain and rage against Westminster elites, on which we all have to reflect.
The late Member for Chesterfield, the right hon. Tony Benn, who was an opponent of the EU to his dying day, said:
“My view of the EU has always been not that I am hostile to foreigners but I am in favour of democracy.”
I respect those people who voted to leave. My experience of the EU campaign is that people wanted information, were trying to compare competing claims, and were doing their best to exercise their right to vote responsibly. The turnout was high. Nobody wants to think that the Vote Leave campaign peddled deliberately bogus slogans. I speak on behalf of not just Labour Members, but the British voting public as a whole. At a time when money was never more needed for the NHS, when can we expect to see the £350 million a week extra for the NHS that the Vote Leave campaign promised would be a consequence of the Brexit vote—or was it deceiving the public?
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
Perhaps I will cut down my speech a bit. I give a particularly warm welcome to all my Back-Bench colleagues here; it is wonderful to see them coming out in support in such numbers. I thank the shadow Health Secretary for calling this debate. She is right to talk about the issues of NHS funding—though not particularly through this motion, which I will come on to speak about. I welcome her to her first Opposition day debate, as I welcomed her earlier to her first statement. This is a brief that she knows well, having been shadow Public Health Minister, and having campaigned on a lot of very important topics, including plain paper packaging for cigarettes. She has done a lot of work with the all-party sickle cell and thalassaemia group as well. I wish her luck in two areas. The first is with her parliamentary questions, after last week’s question to the Department for International Development about a drought in Indonesia, when it was in fact in the Philippines. Secondly, I wish her luck finding some Front-Bench colleagues, just as I need luck finding some Back-Bench colleagues in these debates.
We are in agreement on Brexit; we were both on the remain side, and I campaigned strongly with the hon. Lady. I agree with her that however much we may have disagreed with the vote, it is very important that we respect it. She and I both worried about the damage that it might do to our economy and society if we left, but we also agree that it would do incredible damage to something even more important than them—to our democracy—if the British people were to think that the Westminster establishment was trying somehow to ignore their decision.
From the reasonable tone of her comments, I know that the hon. Lady understands that Vote Leave was not speaking for the Government when it said that there would potentially be an extra £350 million for the NHS. In fairness to the Vote Leave campaigners, at various points they clarified downwards that slogan on the side of the bus and said that they were really talking about a net figure of more like £100 million that could potentially go to the NHS, rather than £350 million.
