Health and Social Care

Debate between James Duddridge and Andy Burnham

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

Like you, Mr Speaker, I am tempted to say, “Is that it?” I suggest to the Secretary of State that he starts reading the weekend newspapers. He began with complacent statements about how everything is marvellous and it is all going so well, but it will not feel like that to staff working in A and E. The Secretary of State’s statement will just confirm to them that he is completely out of touch.

Every day brings new signs of an NHS in distress: more ambulance queues outside A and E; more patients left waiting for a call-back by a 111 service ill-equipped to deal with their needs; more older people seeing social care support withdrawn, or struggling to pay spiralling care charges and ending up in A and E; more patients waiting hours in A and E on trolleys in corridors; and more hospitals running way beyond safe occupancy levels. This is the fragile state of the NHS today: battered and bruised by a reorganisation that nobody wanted and nobody voted for; an entire health and care system on the brink, facing huge challenges that require urgent answers. However, we will not find them in this Queen’s Speech. There is no answer to the collapse of social care, and no answer to the understaffing of hospitals or the growing chaos in A and E. On the preventable deaths and health harm caused by smoking and alcohol, there is silence.

This Queen’s Speech is the product of a dysfunctional Government who have lost any ability they once had to face up to the big challenges the country faces. It cements the impression of a failed coalition project now preparing the ground for the next election rather than governing in the national interest. What else could explain the pathetic spectacle this weekend of Government Members, spooked by UKIP, falling over themselves to say that they will be voting against their own legislative programme? Has this place ever seen something so ridiculous?

[James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)]

Will Labour give us a referendum?

[Andy Burnham]

I thought the new compassionate Conservative party was meant to have stopped “banging on about Europe”—that was the phrase, was it not?—but now its Members are all dancing to UKIP’s tune and reading out what Mr Crosby gives them. It will not wash. The country can see that this is a shambles of a Government who look ridiculous to the country they purport to govern. When Britain needed leadership, it got the farce of this coalition. There is no need to send in the clowns; they are already here.