Health, Social Care and Security

Maria Caulfield Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

Government Members can mock, but Londoners are very concerned that within the overall levels of crime, there is rising violent, knife and gun crime. No, I have never heard the Metropolitan police talk so clearly about funding problems.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

It is good to see you back in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I start my four minutes by paying tribute to the amazing maiden speeches we have heard this afternoon from my hon. Friends the Members for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami), for Gordon (Colin Clark) and for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), and the hon. Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams). It is great to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine).

I will focus my short time on social care and the pay cap. I will not go over the same ground as my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), because she echoed everything I wanted to say. My message to Ministers is that the consultation is much welcome, because we cannot kid ourselves. The current social care system is not working. I echo that we need to move health and social care together by commissioning them together, paying for them together and delivering them together. Until we do, we are just rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship.

My plea to Ministers is that the consultation is not just about how we fund social care, because we will be missing a trick if we just do that. We need to consider the structure of social care and the population we aim to serve. When the system was set up many, many years ago, with the NHS looking after healthcare and local authorities looking after social care, the population we were caring for was very different. We now look after a much older population who have many comorbidities who need multiple services. We are now looking after patients who are living with diseases that people used to die from; those patients often die from something else completely. It is a different population, and we need to structure the service around their needs and what works best for them.

I declare an interest in the pay cap. Having worked as a nurse from 2010 to 2015 under the pay cap, I know exactly how difficult it is and how challenging the finances are. Most nurses I know work in their hospital bank to supplement their wages. Let us look at the issue seriously. On the whole, nurses were initially very understanding of the pay freeze, but we are now seven years into this, with no end date in sight. We need to support nurses and all healthcare professionals in this situation because, unless we do, the £3.7 billion that we currently spend on agency fees will only increase as people vote with their feet. Nurses make life-and-death decisions on every shift. It cannot be right that they are paid, on average, £34,000—the Royal College of Nursing disputes that figure, saying that the real figure is £26,000 a year, as most nurses are paid, on average, in bands 5 to 6—yet hospital managers, who make important but not life-threatening decisions, are paid on average £45,000 a year and senior managers are paid £75,000 a year. We need to look at the pay structure for nurses, as well as the pay freeze.

I have a final point to make. When the Labour Government were in control they had a great opportunity in 2004 to deal with that situation under Agenda for Change, but they wasted that opportunity. They wanted to reduce the wage bill by £1.3 billion and they downgraded nurses from the General Whitley Council to the Agenda for Change banding structure, with many nurses losing pay and grades as a result. Let us not pretend that when the Labour Government were in charge they did any better.