Oral Answers to Questions

Gary Sambrook Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Because this is a big team effort by a combination of public and private sector partners. I pay tribute to Deloitte, without which the testing programme would not be possible. I pay tribute to all the pharmaceutical companies and I pay tribute to Amazon, which has delivered the home testing with remarkable success. Instead of trying to divide, we should unite and bring people together.

[Gary Sambrook (Birmingham, Northfield) (Con)]

Dr David Rosser and his team at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust have done amazing work during the pandemic to make sure that people in Birmingham are safe and cared for. Will the Secretary of State give them all the flexibility and support they need to ensure that services at hospitals like Queen Elizabeth can go back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes. David Rosser is a great leader of a very, very impressive trust. I was speaking to him only last week. There is an important lesson from covid, which is that many of the NHS central rules and much of the bureaucracy was lifted to allow local systems to respond as a health system. That has worked well. We need to learn from that. We need to not only make that permanent, but see where we can go further in that sort of system working.