Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Helen Whately)]

Right now, we are seeing more people come forward for cancer diagnosis or to be given the all-clear. We are supporting services with an extra £8 billion for elective recovery. Cancer is an important part of our major conditions strategy, which the Secretary of State just announced, because we are determined to include patients’ cancer outcomes.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

In today’s Shropshire Star, my local paper, there is an eight-page spread on what is happening to healthcare in Shropshire, which is described as a war zone. Will the Secretary of State meet me and other Shropshire MPs to discuss the challenges we face?

[Steve Barclay]

I am happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the issues in Shropshire. I draw her attention to the fact that we have more doctors, more nurses and more funding going into the NHS, and more people are being treated.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

8. What steps he is taking to raise the quality of leadership and management across the health and social care sectors.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

16. What steps he is taking to raise the quality of leadership and management across the health and social care sectors.

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Sajid Javid)]

In health and care, strong leadership can make the difference between life and death. I have been clear that we can accept only the highest possible standards and that in some cases poor leadership has been tolerated for too long. That is why I have accepted in full the recommendations of General Sir Gordon Messenger’s independent review and will set out a delivery plan to begin what I think will be the biggest shake-up in health and social care leadership in a generation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Allan]

Orthopaedic surgery at the Princess Royal Hospital has still not restarted since the pandemic. That is causing huge suffering for those who have been waiting for surgery, in some cases for several years. A hip replacement is transformative to quality of life and reduces other care needs, but orthopaedic surgeons continue to be paid despite not operating, and no alternative is being offered to patients—they are not even being given an expected operation date. Will implementing the Messenger review require NHS leadership to be more accountable to the public so that decisions such as refusing to restart much-needed surgery can be challenged?

[Mr Speaker]

This is a strange grouping, but it is a very important question, so do answer it, please.

Health and Social Care Leadership Review

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

That is exactly why I have commissioned a 15-year workforce strategy from the NHS.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and congratulate him on the work he has been doing in this important area. Does he agree that for too long there has been a culture of a lack of accountability among NHS senior management, and too often a blame culture, where things go wrong but are not transparently acknowledged? Does he agree how awful that is for the patients concerned? Will he do everything possible to ensure that we tackle the blame culture and the lack of accountability to the public, who the NHS is there to serve?

[Sajid Javid]

I agree very much with my hon. Friend. She will know from her own NHS trust, particularly the maternity problems there and the terrible cases set out in the Donna Ockenden report, just where that kind of culture can lead. Of course there are fantastic examples day in, day out of great culture and great leadership in the NHS, but there are also poor outcomes. She is absolutely right that we need to tackle those. That is exactly what is in this report.

Ambulance Response Times: Shropshire

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I thank Mr Speaker for granting today’s Adjournment debate on a topic that is so important to my constituents in North Shropshire and to people across Shropshire and across the country. I start by making it clear that I am not here to criticise the hard-working NHS staff in our ambulance services and emergency departments. Indeed, I thank them for their incredibly hard and dedicated work in difficult and demotivating circumstances, but there is clearly a problem with the provision of emergency care in Shropshire, with complex causes, and I bring it before this House to urge the Government to take some action.

It was clear throughout my election campaign, and has been clear from my inbox since then, that stories of excessive waits for an ambulance are not a rarity. I have since urged my constituents to contact me and share their experiences. Just since Monday, my office has been met with a tidal wave of correspondence, each story as saddening and frightening as the last. A care home reported a wait of 19 hours for an elderly resident with a broken hip. An elderly diabetic man fell and dislocated his shoulder. He was advised not to drink or eat anything in case surgery was required, and then waited 15 hours for an ambulance to arrive. A disabled man fell in his bathroom and waited for 21 hours for an ambulance. He was fortunately lifted from the floor after eight hours by a helpful neighbour. A man waited with a stranger experiencing heart attack symptoms on the side of the road for hours, only to give up and drive the gentleman to A&E himself.

A man with a suspected stroke waited nine hours for an ambulance and a further five in the ambulance waiting to be transferred into hospital. A 92-year-old lady fell at 8.30 in the morning, suffering bleeding from the head and a broken leg. She was looked after by her 75-year-old neighbour for almost eight hours until the ambulance arrived, and then waited in the ambulance for transfer into the A&E department until 2.30 the next morning. She had not eaten since 6.30 the evening before her fall. An elderly woman fell down the stairs shortly after lunch. Her emergency carers—she has a red button to press for them—made her comfortable and called an ambulance, but they could not carry on waiting forever. After an 11-hour wait, she was alone with her front door open so that the ambulance crew could access her house. That was 3 o’clock in the morning.

I could easily spend the next half hour relating heartbreaking stories, and I thank all my constituents who contacted me for taking the time to get in touch and explain the scale of the problem. One story in particular brought the issue home, and some Members may have read about it in the newspapers. It was the story of a young footballer who slipped on AstroTurf while playing football at school. He dislocated his knee and waited so long for an ambulance that by the time one finally arrived he had developed hypothermia. I do not know whether Members can imagine the distress of this young man, and the teaching staff who stayed on in the dark, long after the school day had ended, as his condition deteriorated out in the cold.

What all these stories have in common is that they could have been much worse. I am sure everyone in the House would agree that nobody should have to suffer waiting an excessive amount of time for an ambulance, yet tragically in North Shropshire it is pretty common. I know this problem is not unique to Shropshire. I am sure that many colleagues have received similar emails describing similar events. In parts of Britain, an excessive wait for an ambulance has become normal.

The problems surrounding this crisis are complex, and I am not here to propose a simple quick fix. However, there are consistent themes at the core of the issue. It is vital that we recognise them if we are to work out how to move on from here. The first is the problem of handing over patients at the emergency departments in Shrewsbury and Telford. West Midlands Ambulance Service has told me that, on the day the young footballer dislocated his knee, 868 hours were lost waiting to hand over patients, and that nearly 2,600 hours were lost in the month up to 29 March. Handover times in Shropshire are significantly worse than in the rest of the country, and there have been times when every ambulance based in Shropshire is waiting outside a hospital to discharge a patient.

The hospital trust has declared a critical incident on no less than four separate occasions so far this year, and each of those incidents coincided with an increase in the number of heartbreaking stories coming into my inbox.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this incredibly important issue to the House. Such heartbreaking stories are common to all Shropshire MPs. Does she agree that a combination of factors—I am sure she will go on to discuss some of them—including the transfer of patients on to wards, as well as the inaccessibility of general practitioners, is putting additional pressure on A&E?

[Helen Morgan]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I entirely agree with her. I will stress some of those points later in my speech.

The emergency departments of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust report that they suffer from a shortage of space and staff, along with the additional challenges of separating covid patients—on Tuesday this week, the trust had more covid patients than at any previous point in the pandemic. The trust also reports delays in discharging patients who are well enough to leave hospital because it is struggling to find care packages or care home spaces.

A number of care homes in Shropshire are currently closed because of the pandemic. Shropshire shares the national problem of a shortage of care workers and care homes, which is probably exacerbated by our high proportion of elderly patients. The inability to discharge patients who would doubtless be better off at home or in a care home setting reduces the flow of patients through the hospital.

The impact of all this is that, because ambulances wait so long at hospitals, the vast majority of ambulance journeys across Shropshire begin in Shrewsbury or Telford. It is not possible to reach the most seriously ill patients towards the edge of the county within the target time if the ambulance sets out from one of those two towns. This, combined with the closure of community ambulance stations, means that very few ambulances are free in places such as Oswestry and Market Drayton when people become ill and require one.

Another factor, as the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) alluded to, is the volume of patients accessing emergency departments, or being taken to one in an ambulance, because there is no other option locally, particularly in the evening or at the weekend. Shropshire has a worsening shortage of GPs, which is leading to patients attending emergency departments for relatively minor issues because they simply have no alternative. A key reason behind the problem of staff recruitment is the chronic lack of other services in Shropshire, but that is a debate for another day.

The Government must deliver on their promise to recruit more GPs, and they must ensure that people with non-urgent healthcare needs are provided with adequate resources in the community. I am incredibly proud that my constituents Sian Tasker and Lawrence Chappel in Oswestry and, beyond my constituency, Darren Childs in Ludlow, and other campaigners, are working tirelessly to keep this issue in the public light and are campaigning to keep their community ambulance stations open. It is partly because of their hard work that we are finally discussing this issue in Parliament.

I am afraid to say that, so far, the Government have refused to listen to the countless warnings by campaigners and those working on the frontline. The Care Quality Commission’s “State of health care and adult social care in England” report last year, gave a stark warning that overstretched ambulance services and emergency departments are putting patients at risk. The numbers speak for themselves. The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives has found that, nationally, 160,000 people a year are coming to harm because of delayed handovers to A&E. Of those, a shocking 12,000 experience severe harm.

I have repeatedly asked the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to meet me and the West Midlands Ambulance Service to discuss how we can tackle local issues together. I am deeply disappointed that, so far, he has refused my request. It seems to many people in Shropshire that the Department of Health and Social Care is burying its head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue we face. I take this opportunity to urge the Minister to meet me and my colleagues across the county to discuss the crisis and to hear some first-hand accounts of those left waiting in distress so that we can come to some sort of solution together.

I have no doubt that all hon. Members present, including those on the Government Benches, want to ensure that people at their most vulnerable are kept safe. I welcome the recently announced additional £55 million of support for ambulance services. I fear, however, that that money may not go far enough or may not be targeted in the areas of greatest need. The hopes of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are pinned on the Future Fit hospital transformation programme, which kicked off in 2013. It is reliant on £312 million of funding, the source of which may be an interest-bearing loan—I will happily correct the record if I am incorrect, but that is my understanding. Unfortunately, more than eight years later, a strategic outline case has still not been signed off. The estimated costs have spiralled by almost 70% and it is likely that they will not be covered by the Government.

The initial promises of urgent care centres in more rural areas—for example, one was guaranteed for Oswestry—investment in community hospitals and local planned care centres were all quietly dropped in the summer of 2015. Promises of investment in public health and prevention, which is a good idea and would have been welcome in Shropshire, are also apparently no further forward. We are consistently told that there is no more money in the pot for faster, better-resourced ambulance services or urgent care staff, yet the Government wasted more than £10 billion on personal protective equipment that is not up to scratch. It is time that they listened to the warning signs that they have been ignoring and finally step up to provide proper support for ambulance services and accident and emergency departments.

There are several steps that the Government could take right away to get to the bottom of the causes of the issue. The Secretary of State could commission the Care Quality Commission under powers laid out in section 48 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to conduct an investigation into the causes and impacts of ambulance service delays. That is a fairly simple step and the law already allows for him to commission the CQC. Once the Government have a professional assessment of the complexity of the causes of the delays to ambulance service response, they can take the correct steps, targeted at the correct causes of the problems, to make some rapid improvements to the service. As I have outlined, the causes will most likely lie in a number of areas across emergency and social care, but until they are fully understood by the right people, they cannot be resolved.

The Government could also pass the Ambulance Waiting Times (Local Reporting) Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), which would require accessible, localised reports of ambulance response times to be published. Once the data was available, it would enable central and devolved Governments to accurately understand where the delays are and how best to tackle them, because we should be following the data and the facts to provide the right solutions and the right resourcing in the areas that need them most. That Bill is already written, it has had its First Reading and it is ready to go.

I brought this debate to Parliament to ensure that the Minister and the Secretary of State understand the scale of the problem in Shropshire and, crucially, the urgency in resolving it. How many more elderly citizens will have to wait for 10 hours, with their front door open, for an ambulance? How many more people will have to wait at the roadside with a stranger who they believe might be close to death? How many more young adults will develop hypothermia when they initially have a trivial injury, such as a dislocated knee? How many more cases of serious harm, or even avoidable death, will it take?

I thank the Minister for being here this evening and responding to my speech. I also thank Mr Speaker for granting this Adjournment debate. I take the opportunity to thank everybody in the Chamber for coming along and to wish them a happy Easter and a restful break.

Ockenden Report

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. I assure her that constituents throughout Shropshire, Telford and the Wrekin, and indeed families across England, will be safer as a result of those brave families coming forward and this report.

On resources, the hon. Lady will have heard me talk about the £95 million given at the time of the interim report, plus the £127 million given for maternity services in the past few days. We will keep that under review.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his very welcome statement and the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), for her excellent work. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) for everything that he has done for patient safety; he has led the way, and I am so grateful.

Does the Secretary of State believe that what we have seen at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is indicative of a culture in which senior management were unaccountable, no one felt responsible, failings were minimised, poor care was normalised and women’s voices were not heard? Will he do everything he can to increase the accountability of senior management across the NHS so that that institutional blindness can never again cause such harm to those who put their trust in the NHS?

[Sajid Javid]

Let me first thank my hon. Friend for her approach and her role in helping to make the report happen, and for the way in which she has worked with me, and with Ministers in my Department, on this most important of issues. She is right to talk about the importance of culture, especially given that, as the report makes clear, the voices of women were not heard time and again. I want to reassure her that we will implement all the report’s recommendations, but, more broadly, that women’s voices will be at the heart of the upcoming women’s health strategy.

NHS Capital Spend and Health Inequalities

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to secure this debate and to have the excellent Minister responsible for hospitals, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), on the Front Bench for it. I wish to speak about an issue that has been uppermost in the minds of my constituents for the past nine years, causing much anxiety and uncertainty. All MPs want better health for their constituents and better access to healthcare. That is all the more true for MPs who represent communities that experience the highest levels of deprivation.

As the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care set out earlier this month in an important speech at the Royal College of Physicians, the poorer a person is, the greater the proportion of their life spent in poor health will be. He referred to the 20-year difference in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest communities. If someone lives in an area in the bottom decile for deprivation, they can expect to have 20 fewer years of healthy life than someone who lives in an area in the most affluent decile. If someone is poor, not only is their life expectancy lower, but more of their life is spent in ill health.

Telford has some of the poorest communities in England. In our area, 30,000 people live in the bottom decile for deprivation, and the impact is seen in health outcomes across every measure. The Secretary of State was therefore right to say that

“poor health is economically destructive and socially unjust.”

I applaud him for focusing attention on this issue.

If Members look at a map of areas of deprivation in the whole of Shropshire, they will see in Telford, splashed in red, a cluster of 18 lower super output areas in the bottom decile for deprivation. That compares with only two such areas in the whole of the rest of the county. On every health measure, people in Telford have worse outcomes than people in Shropshire. For example, cancer incidence, cancer mortality and later-stage diagnosis are all much higher in Telford than they are in Shropshire. In Shropshire, the mortality rate is 8% below the national average, whereas in Telford it is 15% above the national average.

The problem in Telford is getting worse, not better. This is what we should be talking about in Telford, but we do not. Instead, for the last nine years, the health bodies in Shropshire—the clinical commissioning group, the hospital trust, the sustainability and transformation plan, the integrated care system—have all being talking about a capital spending plan that was once called “Future Fit” but is now referred to as a hospital transformation plan. This plan is expensive and controversial.

The Government made £312 million available to Shropshire health bodies to improve Shropshire’s healthcare, which was great news. The local health bodies set about coming up with a plan. The plan they devised involved a brand-new, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge critical care centre, which was to be built in the west of the county, in Shrewsbury. The plan was controversial because it proposed that Telford’s A&E, in the poorer, urban east of the county, become an urgent care centre, and that Telford’s women’s and children’s specialist centre relocate to Shrewsbury. In effect, the greater part of this significant sum of taxpayers’ money would be invested in Shrewsbury, and specialist services would be removed from Telford, a rapidly growing new town to which people come in their thousands every year to build a better life.

Among the reasons given for choosing Shrewsbury as the location for this new specialist centre was that the consultants and management would rather live and work there than in Telford, and that it would make recruitment easier. Perhaps the initial decision makers, who are long gone, thought they could ride out the criticism. They talked of twisting the arm of local clinicians, but they overlooked something fundamental. Telford has a unique identity and demographic. It is a rapidly growing new town in an area that has historically been perceived as the poor relation to the affluent shires. Telford is made to feel like a town of incomers, surrounded by a rural hinterland to which it does not belong.

Given Telford’s history, identity, and demographics, concerns should have sounded loud and clear about the plan, under which an area with significant deprivation lost out in NHS healthcare investment to its more affluent neighbour. But nobody wanted to listen. No one wanted to hear. My greatest frustration as Telford’s MP was that I could not get the voice of the communities that I represent—the communities with the fewest years of healthy life—heard. I was talked at, talked over, dismissed and disregarded. The plan was going ahead, and that was that.

I know that all politicians will want shiny new hospitals in their constituency, and that this desire may trump proper concern for improving the health of disadvantaged communities in neighbouring constituencies. I also know that the Labour leader of Telford and Wrekin Council, Councillor Shaun Davies, exploited the situation politically and deliberately misled local people by claiming that all A&E services would be closed in Telford thanks to a Tory Government. I therefore understand health bodies’ scepticism when politicians try to make a case. However, the partisan behaviour of some local politicians does not mean that all reasonable objections to the plan should be ignored; but that is what happened here. Nobody would listen to a contrary view.

The data is clear. If local decision makers had been driven by considerations of healthcare need and health inequality, as they should be, the plan would not have been formulated or proposed in the way that it was. What followed was predictable: there were protests, petitions, angry public meetings, endless futile private meetings and marches. There was legal action, and there were pages of newsprint at every election and by-election—at parish council elections, borough council elections, and three general elections. On every leaflet that came through every door, anger and rage was whipped up against the Government by those who sought to profit electorally, as year after year, ordinary people were told that they would lose all their A&E services to their better-off neighbours.

The decision makers could not, or would not, distinguish between confected political outrage and genuine concerns about their plan. They ploughed on regardless, but they did not get far. Nine years on, nothing has been built, and costs have spiralled. As of July 2020, the plan was £221 million over budget—and that was when inflation was below 1%; no one knows what the price tag would be today.

Last month, local health bodies were still talking about how they were

“continuing to work closely and collaboratively with NHSE and our local health system partners…continuing to explore the outputs of the public consultation”—

which had been held four years ago, back in 2018—

“continuing to develop more detailed plans and continuing to develop business cases.”

Nine years on, this is where we are: continuing on the same path, immune to changing circumstances and continuing to ignore the underlying health inequality across our area. So much management time, so many consultants, so many accountants, and so many highly paid staff tied up year after year, involved in a massive distraction project. They were not able to articulate how my constituents would benefit or to focus on what really matters—patient care, patient safety, and improving the health of people in the poorest areas.

I am very grateful to the former Secretary of State who, in 2019, made it clear that Telford would have a local A&E 24/7 with same-day emergency care. I am grateful, too, to the current Secretary of State for his help in getting confirmation of that position earlier in the year. This is a significant win and I am grateful for it. Ministers have always been willing to listen, including my hon. Friend the Minister for Health, who is on the Front Bench tonight.

It is now clear that the project cannot happen anywhere close to budget, and given all the other significant challenges that we face in delivering healthcare in Shropshire, this costly plan from a different era has run out of road. My plea to NHS England now is to call time. After nine years, all organisations are doing things differently. The NHS is doing things differently; it has evolved and moved on. It is no longer about increasing hospital capacity, but about tackling the causes of poor health.

This plan does not address increasing demand for healthcare. It does not address improving access to healthcare for those who need it. The plan is treating the symptoms, not the causes. It is time to tackle the causes of poor health. The NHS recognises this and the Health Secretary is prioritising this, so local health bodies in Shropshire cannot go on ignoring this.

The NHS website says it very clearly. It says that health inequalities are

“the preventable, unfair and unjust differences in health…that arise from the unequal distribution of social…and economic conditions…which determine the risk of people getting ill…and impact on their ability to prevent illness and their ability to access treatment when ill.”

The NHS today cares about prevention. It cares about keeping people out of hospital and delivering more care and more services close to those with the greatest need. It is not about pumping more and more money into shiny new buildings in areas miles away from the county’s most deprived communities.

The overall health ecosystem in Shropshire faces many challenges. Plans for its future need to be considered in that context. The hospital trust has been in special measures since 2018. Senior management have come and gone at record rates. Repeated critical incidents are declared—three in the past months—because A&E is overwhelmed.

This is the same trust that, in one day last week, had waiting times to unload ambulances that added up to the equivalent of 25 ambulances and paramedic teams being off the road for a day. This is the same trust that has the Ockenden maternity review, reporting next week, into poor and negligent care resulting in death, injury and trauma to women and their children, and it is the same trust that did not listen to them.

In spite of these challenges, our health leaders devoted their time to the unaffordable business cases and strategic outline plans for this undeliverable project. I do not blame the current postholders, who are trying their best, but there is someone, somewhere in NHS England who needs to take stock. This is an Alice in Wonderland plan—more and more money being funnelled into a capital project that does not solve the healthcare challenges and does not deliver on NHS objectives.

I take this opportunity to ask NHS England to think again; maybe the Minister can kindly help to get that message through. I understand that sunk costs and time will be written off, but this plan is at least £221 million over budget and does not address the health needs of those whose health is poorest. It must be time to focus on patient care, patient safety, prevention, diagnostics, access to primary care and tackling preventable conditions early so that people can live more healthily for longer.

As an MP, how am I to ask my constituents to pay more for the NHS, if all they see is more and more of their cash being shovelled into a state-of-the-art building the other side of the county? It is those same constituents who experience the worst health outcomes, the lowest life expectancy and the most years in poor health, not just in Shropshire, but nationally. How can we plan to spend more than a billion pounds and make no mention of how we are improving their health and their access to healthcare?

I have two asks of the Minister. First, I ask him to stand firm on the agreed £312 million budget for this transformation plan and, if there is an extra £221 million down the back of the sofa—I am assured by Treasury that there is not—to use the additional capital spend, if available to Shropshire, to improve health and access to healthcare where it is needed most, on local diagnostics, screening and prevention services, so that we can narrow the gap of healthy life expectancy. Secondly, I ask him to confirm for the record that, whatever the outcome of this nine-year saga, Telford, with its cluster of 18 areas in the bottom decile for deprivation, will have a local, 24/7 A&E, capable of same-day emergency care.

This Government are rightly committed to prevention and tackling health inequalities, and I welcome that. Local health bodies should focus on that too, particularly when embarking on significant capital spend projects. They must be able to say how the poorest communities with the poorest health will benefit before just expecting more and more of taxpayers’ cash.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Minister, Edward Argar.

Integration White Paper

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I saw the hon. Gentleman’s final point coming. To his original point, we are always happy to speak to the devolved Administrations and learn from their ideas, just as I am sure they occasionally look to England to see what they can learn—that is part of being a member of this Union. I speak regularly to the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), including about such matters. To his final point, all I would say is that since 2010 we have seen around 30,000 more doctors and 38,000 more nurses in the English NHS—I have highlighted the role that my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) played in that—so I think we are doing a pretty good job of continuing to grow the workforce. There is much more to do, but we have a plan and we are delivering on it.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I welcome this ambitious and much-needed programme of reform. One of the greatest challenges is ensuring the accountability of NHS bodies to local people, and I wonder whether the Minister could say a bit more about how these plans will ensure that local NHS bodies are accountable to the local people they serve.

Elective Treatment

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I am surprised with the argument and the tone of the hon. Gentleman. It is 2022, not 2024. We have all come to expect the scaremongering that we have just heard from the Labour Benches at election time—that has happened in every election campaign since the war—but what I did not expect is this scaremongering from the hon. Gentleman on the plans to recover in the wake of a deadly pandemic.

I am astonished and disappointed that the hon. Gentleman is willing to stand there and claim that there is no covid backlog. [Interruption.] That is what he just said. He just said that there is no covid backlog. He is well aware that this country has just gone through its biggest health challenge in history. He is also well aware that there has been a national mission across the NHS to deal with that challenge and to recover from it. I paid tribute to the hon. Gentleman just last week in this House—perhaps I was just a bit too early—when he rightly supported the nation’s vaccination programme, because he understood just how important it was. Perhaps some of his Back Benchers have now got to him, so instead of standing up for the British people, he is just thinking about his own leadership prospects in his party—perhaps that is what is actually going on.

Today, instead of doing the right thing and backing the NHS—backing the hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and everyone working heroically across the NHS—the hon. Gentleman decided to play party politics. A moment ago, he heard me talk about the 10 million people who the NHS estimates have stayed away from the NHS and who need reassurance from both sides of the House about what the NHS is doing. He should reconsider his approach and work together in the national interest.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I welcome the statement and I am grateful to the Secretary of State for setting out a covid recovery plan to tackle the challenges that lie ahead. Every single Member of the House should support him in that endeavour. I ask him, however, how he will tackle the staffing crisis.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my hon. Friend for her support. Over the past two years, the number of clinicians in the NHS has risen by about 40,000. In the past year, we have 10,000 more nurses, 5,000 more doctors and more people in medical school than ever before, so a huge amount of record investment is going into the workforce. Recently, I also asked the NHS to put together a long-term 10-year-plus workforce strategy and I look forward to receiving it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise this issue, and I thank him for his comments at the start. We all know, as we have just heard from the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), that the NHS in particular and social care have been under huge pressure; I think it has been the most challenging time in their history. Everyone has performed in a way that we can all be proud of. Despite that, we have seen a huge rise in electives, and I think that the number will go higher before it goes lower, because so many people stayed away when they were asked to. I want them to come forward. I want them to know that the NHS is open for them. We will support it with a bigger workforce and more investment, including the £36 billion of extra investment from the new NHS and social care levy.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

T4. Delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment have had tragic consequences for some of my constituents. What is my right hon. Friend doing to improve cancer survival rates?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend raises an issue that is very close to my heart, and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) rightly raised it a moment ago, too. The pandemic has exposed huge health disparities in this country. It is clear to me that we need to go much further on cancer, not only to catch up on cancer referrals, diagnosis and treatment and radical innovation, but to improve the persistently poor outcomes that patients in this country have long experienced compared to those in other countries. It is time we launched a war on cancer. I am working on a new vision to radically improve the outcome for cancer patients across the United Kingdom, and I will have more to say on that in due course.

Covid-19 Vaccinations

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

I thank the hon. Lady for her update on what is happening in Scotland. I commend those involved in the roll-out of the vaccination programme in Scotland. We can all learn lessons from each other in this pandemic and it is only right that we do so. On the contracts the hon. Lady talked about, I will not comment on commercial decisions.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her statement and the excellent work that she and her team are doing to roll out boosters as fast as possible. I urge her to consider whether bookings for boosters could be made in advance, so that people are already booked in when they become eligible and can immediately have their booster.

[Maggie Throup]

I reassure my hon. Friend that we always look at ways to make it easier for people to get their booster, as well as for people to get their first and second jabs and their flu jab. We are always open to looking at opening up further opportunities.