Health

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate because it is a Queen’s Speech that will help to deliver a stronger economy for this country and better and stronger public services. Four years ago, this Government embarked on a radical and necessary programme of measures to turn the fortunes of this country and our economy around. For 13 years, my constituents were betrayed and let down by the previous Government, as taxes rose while unemployment soared, the economy went into meltdown and public services wasted taxpayers’ money on a colossal scale.

It is a tribute to this Government’s economic focus and policies that we have been able to turn things around. Ministers have implemented many clear measures. For example, unemployment in my constituency is now almost half the level it was when it peaked under the previous Government in 2009. These are the positive policies that I bring to today’s debate on the NHS. It is a testament to this Government’s commitment to the NHS that we are now seeing an increase in spending.

I heard the opening speeches in the debate, including by Labour Members. It is appalling that the Labour party likes to talk as though it owns the NHS politically. That is wrong. Labour should listen to some of the facts not just in my constituency but in the eastern region. The fact is that Labour went into the last general election with plans to cut NHS spending—we have heard about the impact of that in Wales—while we have continued to invest in the NHS. While Conservatives recognise the increasing pressures that the country faces from demographics and the health care needs of the public—

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Priti Patel]

I want to develop my discussion and go into more detail on the NHS. More investment in the NHS is required. This is not about cutting services, including front-line services, or funds. It is about expanding the NHS in the right way and, as the Secretary of State said, putting patients first and moving away from the bureaucratisation of the NHS.

[Lyn Brown]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Priti Patel]

Let me continue.

There were classic examples of that not just in my constituency but more widely in Essex. We heard earlier about Basildon hospital. In my constituency, one primary care trust saw its number of managers and senior managers increase tenfold over a decade. At the same time, it failed miserably to recognise the health needs of my constituents; we have a growing population as well as an ageing population. I had cases in 2010 where patients were denied access to life-saving hospital treatment and access to drugs because the PCT sought to prioritise spending on the bureaucracy of the NHS, rather than front-line patient care.

In Witham town, at the heart of my constituency, there is a chronic shortage of locally accessible health care facilities. All the talk by Labour and the slogans referring to “record investment” under Labour translated into nothing in my constituency. Under the previous PCT and the previous regime, we had consultation after consultation but no new services were created.

[Lyn Brown]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

The health service is very close to everyone’s hearts, and there are a lot of political gains to be made from it. I have to say that, as the Member of Parliament for Burnley, my election chances were boosted when Labour’s Secretary of State closed down our A and E unit. I am delighted to say that the coalition Government have now delivered us a brand new emergency centre in Burnley, which shows that the coalition Government have delivered good things, especially for the people of Burnley.

There is one issue that I really want to talk about today. I have been a councillor for 31 years—I stood for election only last month and increased my majority over Labour in my ward—and the issue that has become very close to my heart is the care of elderly people. I am talking about elderly people who are on their own. People from companies call on them in the morning to get them out of bed. They stay for 10 minutes to make sure they are up and have had some breakfast. They then come back at lunchtime to make sure they have eaten some lunch, and then again in the afternoon to make sure they have had their tea. They come back in the evening. As one elderly man said to me, “They come back at 8 o’clock and tell me to get ready for bed.” He said, “I don’t want to go to bed at 8 o’clock in the evening. I am 87 years old. I fought for this country, and now they are telling me that I have to go to bed at 8 o’clock. I don’t want to do that.” What he wants is for someone to come and see him in the morning and talk to him. He is housebound, and he does not have a family. He is not the only one in that situation. There are many more like him in Burnley.

We are a poor town and people cannot afford to pay for private services. These people want to talk to somebody in the morning when they get up; they want a bit of conversation. They do not want staff running in with their meals-on-wheels food in a foil container saying, “We’ll come back and see you later.” They want to talk to someone. They want to know that there is somebody who cares for them; somebody who is interested in listening to them. This elderly man has some fantastic stories about his life; I have seen him many times. When the staff come back in the evening, he is not asking them to stay all night. He is asking them to show a little bit of interest in him, and he certainly does not want to go to bed at 8 o’clock at night. He has never gone to bed at that time and for someone to tell him that he has to do so, “or he’ll be on his own” is wrong. I am not being political here. All I am saying is that we should care more for the elderly people of this country. I am talking not about people who are in their 60s, but about people who are in their 80s and 90s who, unfortunately, have been left on their own. They might be elderly ladies whose husbands have died. These are people who have worked for this country all their lives and fought for this country, and are now, certainly in my constituency anyway, being left alone. I find that hard to accept. I might be unusual. There might be people who think it is tough and bad luck, but I do not think that. We should be looking after these people and showing them some compassion. We are a wealthy country. Apparently, we are the fourth or fifth wealthiest country in the world, and the contribution that these people have made over their lives has helped to put us in that position.

Burnley is an industrial town; we had the pits and the mills. Now we have high-tech industry where young people work and create wealth. Fortunately these days, they are able to put something aside for their pension, which will help to look after them in their old age. The elderly people from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s could not do that; they were on poor salaries. In the main, the wives did not work. My mother never worked. My father brought up our family, and my mother never worked. All right, my mother and father are dead, but there are still people around who were in the same position. Many have lost a partner and in the main their children are out of the area, and they need us to care for them. Is it a lot to ask for someone to turn up and say, “Hello, Mr Jones. How are you?”

[Lyn Brown]

The whole House is listening very quietly to what the hon. Gentleman is saying because it resonates. My father is 87. He pays for carers to come in from an agency. What has upset us is the fact that his life savings are paying the wages of people who drive Lamborghinis, who employ people on the minimum wage and who provide very poor care to the people the hon. Gentleman is talking about. This Government need to act to ensure that the care offered to our people, which they pay for out of their meagre savings, is of the quality that they deserve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is wonderful to follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), and I totally and utterly agree with her concluding remarks.

Some may say that the absence of any reference to health legislation in the Queen’s Speech is a blessing; after all, the unwanted top-down reorganisation foisted on the NHS by the coalition and the previous Secretary of State is said by many to have put such a strain and stress on the NHS that it has been brought to its knees. Many Members present will know from their casework, inboxes, surgeries and personal experience that there is a rising tide of public concern about the NHS because of the lack of accountability and because decisions are being made upstream from local services. Our constituents may well view the absence of any mention of health in the Queen’s Speech as evidence of complacency, disinterest and unconcern. I have to say that I would agree with them. The Government have taken away the local means to secure improvements in services, and in this Queen’s Speech they have missed an opportunity to bring back local focus and accountability.

I want to look first at GP provision. One of my constituents wrote to me in April out of “sheer despair” at her inability to get an appointment at her surgery for an issue that she has said is not urgent. She has a busy job, is at work at the times she needs to call the surgery, and cannot leave work at the drop of a hat should she be offered an on-the-day appointment. As she put it,

“the current system is an absolute joke, to put it mildly…this current NHS system is completely useless”.

My constituent needs and deserves Labour’s GP access guarantee. Is there anything like that in the Queen’s Speech? The short answer is, “No, there is not, but there should have been.”

My constituents do not have the same access to GPs as people in other areas. Building on NHS England’s most recent survey, the Royal College of General Practitioners shows that 16.82% of patients in Newham were not able to get a GP appointment when needed, compared with 5.36% in Bath and North East Somerset. The Government should adopt the GP access guarantee to address those inequalities, and the Queen’s Speech would have been the right place to introduce such proposals.

Before its abolition, Newham primary care trust had a clear plan to tackle and improve the challenging local situation, of which I was an active and enthusiastic supporter. Today, I am far less sure that mechanisms are in place locally that have the capacity and motivation to root out poor practice and promote the best. My misgivings were confirmed when I asked who now decides what to do when, for example, there is a vacancy at a GP practice in Newham. The answer came back—I still find this astounding—that the decision rests with NHS England. What is more, I was told that the London office of NHS England has a small number of people who deal with the provision of GPs, dentists, opticians and pharmacists. They must struggle to keep up with the paperwork, let alone have any capacity to look at proactive work on quality, improvement and service development.

What local knowledge can NHS England have about what is happening on the ground in Newham? How can that make any sense, and how is NHS England accountable to Newham’s people and its clinicians? What does it say about the reality of this Government’s commitment to localism? It is surely a matter of great regret that the Secretary of State did not seek to use this Queen’s Speech to address some of those very real issues.

In his response, the Secretary of State will no doubt include fine rhetoric about control being in the hands of GPs locally through the clinical commissioning group. He will laud to the skies their skills, commitment to patients and the NHS, and their virtue in all respects. I have talked at length to my CCG in Newham and worked closely with it, and I assure the Secretary of State that I share his opinion of its estimable qualities. In fact, I would add more approving words to his glowing testimony. I also know, however, of the CCG’s absolute frustration at the straitjacket that the new NHS structure requires it to wear, and I share its recognition that the reality of local empowerment is very different from that described by the Secretary of State and enforced with the diktats of NHS England.

The new structures leave decisions in the hands of NHS England. Surely the current Secretary of State can see that that is nonsense. In his calm, perhaps even reflective moments, I think that he knows and would admit that, if only to himself. What a shame that he did not use the Queen’s Speech to intervene and turn his rhetoric of localism into more local control over NHS decisions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am sorry that this debate began with a speech that was smug and complacent even by the standards of the Secretary of State for Health. I thought we had reached a low point until I heard the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) using a speech on the NHS to promote the tobacco industry. I am glad that those speeches have been balanced by those we have just heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) and for Westminster North (Ms Buck). Indeed, the speech from the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), reaffirms Labour’s commitment to the health service, which is fairly lacking from this Government.

I am going to speak about the crisis in the west London health service, partly because it is such a major crisis and partly because I think it indicates the way the Tories are dealing with the health service generally. It began two years ago, almost exactly, with the announcement of the biggest hospital closure programme in the history of the NHS. Since then we have had sham consultations with 100,000 people petitioning and being ignored, U-turns, confusion, incompetence, refusal to answer questions and political chicanery to make what happened in Ilford, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), look like a model of probity. Now we have the contamination of the whole NHS locally, including the primary care sector.

When the closure programme began, the medical director of North West London NHS said, candidly, that if it did not close four A and Es and two major hospitals, it would literally run out of money and go bankrupt. Those are the words he used. I suppose we should be grateful to him, because those statements galvanised the population of west London to engage in “save our hospitals” campaigns, and they have been campaigning for two years in rain and snow. Despite huge disinformation paid for by the taxpayer, by a Conservative council and indeed by the NHS, when I now stand in Lyric square in Hammersmith on a Saturday, I can be sure that 99% of my constituents know what is actually happening. I pay tribute to those campaigners from all political parties—including a lot of ex-Tories, as well people from minor parties, Labour supporters and others. They have really made the running on this issue.

Yes, there were changes. Initially, for example, we were going to lose the whole of Charing Cross hospital. Now there will be a local hospital on the site. When that was first mooted, a senior member of the local Conservatives and a Cabinet member said:

“This is an enormous teaching hospital with a 200-year history. You can’t make the Charing Cross hospital into a local hospital. It’s absurd. People won’t put up with that.”

Within weeks, they were spending ratepayers’ and taxpayers’ money putting out leaflets saying that Charing Cross hospital had been saved. That was compounded last October when the Secretary of State for Health stood here and effectively said, “Oh, it won’t just be an urgent care centre. It’ll be a second-tier emergency department.” Let me clarify the three differences between those two: recovery beds, X-rays and GPs. I thought we had GPs on duty in urgent care centres, but apparently not; we can just have nursing cover. It is an urgent care centre by any other name; to call it an A and E is misleading. It will lead to people with serious medical conditions going there and risking their and their family’s lives—as we have already seen at Chase Farm and elsewhere. Charing Cross and Hammersmith will not have blue-light emergencies—except for heart attacks in the case of Hammersmith. We will not have a stroke unit; we will not have the 500 emergency beds; we will not have intensive treatment. This is a second-class, second-tier health service.

The worst transgression happened in only the past few weeks during the local election campaign. I am not making this up, Madam Deputy Speaker. After the postal votes were opened and the Hammersmith Conservatives saw that we were ahead in some of their safe wards, the Prime Minister was brought down at short notice and locked in the basement of the Conservative party offices with a local journalist and came out with this pronouncement:

“Charing Cross will retain its A&E and services”.

I believe that the Prime Minister is an honourable man, and that he was misled into making that statement. The statement is demonstrably false because the NHS has clearly said that most of those services—other than treatment services, primary care services and elective surgery—will not exist at Charing Cross hospital under any analysis.

I thus went to see Imperial. It was the day after the election and I had been up for 30 hours and was not in a terribly good mood. I went to see the new chief executive of Imperial, and I tried to persuade her that Charing Cross should stay open. I said that I would take the new Labour leader of Hammersmith council to see her, as he might be able to persuade her better than I could. I then left and went home. That evening, she e-mailed to say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you when you were here: we are closing the other A and E in your constituency on 10 September. It was just a short meeting and I did not have time to tell you about it.”

At the same time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North said, the CCG is writing to tell us that it is good news that in year—in the middle of a financial year—it has decided to pull together £140 million from the CCGs around north-west London and to redistribute it into primary care. In other words, they are panicking and having to take desperate measures because the primary care services are so short of money and cannot pick up the slack from the closure of A and E services. We might think, “At least they are doing something”. A substantial proportion—they will not say how much—is going out of my CCG and into other CCGs because, they believe, that is a fair way to distribute money. We are losing not only both A and Es, but our primary care funding and, with the closure of Hammersmith A and E—if we cannot prevent it from going ahead in September—Imperial has admitted in its own board papers that there is insufficient capacity at St Mary’s hospital.

[Lyn Brown]

Has my hon. Friend conducted any analysis that could reveal whether the redistribution of funds among the CCGs will take money from the more deprived areas and give it to those that are better off?

[Mr Slaughter]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. In exactly the same way, the Government are choosing to close the A and E department at Hammersmith hospital, which is slap bang in the middle of one of the most deprived areas of London, covering White City, Old Oak, Harlesden, north Kensington and east Acton. That means that 22,000 people who rely on those A and E services every year will have to travel to St Mary’s hospital in Paddington. They will not be directed to Central Middlesex hospital, which will be closing on the same day, and they will not be directed to Charing Cross hospital, because the plan is to close that within a year or two. They will be told to go to St Mary’s, where there are not enough beds and not enough capacity in A and E to cope with the current demand. That is contrary to undertakings given in the House that there would be no closures of A and E services until alternative services were provided. There will also not be enough acute services to provide a training base for students at Imperial college.

Two weeks ago we won the election in Hammersmith, against the expectations of, at least, the Conservatives, and we won it on this issue. If the Government will not listen to the 100,000 people who petitioned, perhaps they will listen to the people of west London who, on the issue of the NHS, overwhelmingly voted Labour and against the policies that are being pursued by the Conservatives. They should listen, and they should think again about hospital closures that will cost the health and the lives of my constituents.