Margaret Greenwood
Main Page: Margaret Greenwood (Labour - Wirral West)Department Debates - View all Margaret Greenwood's debates with the Leader of the House
(2 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Rees-Mogg
There should be huge vaccine confidence. What has happened with the vaccine programme and the booster programme has meant that this country has been able to get back to normal faster than almost any other country in the world. My hon. Friend and I would particularly note that it is thanks to the fact that we are not in the European Union that we were able to move so quickly. I encourage him to indicate his own confidence in the vaccine and support the vaccine roll-out, because that really has been essential to our economic reopening, to the health of the nation, and to the ability of the NHS to cope with covid. Of course everything else will be looked at in due course, but the success of the programme is fundamental.
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
Happy new year to you, Mr Speaker, and to everybody across the House.
Before Christmas, Virgin Care, which had contracts to deliver a number of NHS services, was taken over by a private equity firm called Twenty20 Capital. Yet we know little about the company’s priorities or strategic approach to delivering services other than the statement on its website that says that it looks for
“significant returns in 2-5 years.”
That will sound alarm bells for people working for it. What is more, the Health and Care Bill will allow integrated care boards to delegate functions, and even devolved budgets, to non-statutory bodies that could include such private equity firms. This has huge implications for patients and staff. So will the Leader of the House provide Government time for a debate on the impact of the Government’s NHS privatisation agenda, and will he ask the Prime Minister to come to this House and be straight with people in England by explaining to them that he is in fact dismantling the national health service as a public service and handing it gift-wrapped to big business? [Interruption.]
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am afraid the heckle from the back answered the question.