Underperforming NHS Trusts: Government Oversight

Debate between Richard Holden and Marie Goldman

Wednesday 14th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government oversight of underperforming NHS trusts.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I am the MP for Chelmsford in Essex, and my local trust is the Mid and South Essex NHS foundation trust. A few years ago, it was decided to put three hospitals under the same trust. My local Broomfield hospital is not actually in my constituency. It is in the neighbouring North West Essex constituency, but for all intents and purposes, it is my hospital because it is the main one serving my constituents, and it fills my inbox every single day with tales of woe from both patients and staff.

I thank other Members whose constituencies are served by the same trust for coming along today. Other hon. Members from across the House, served by other NHS trusts, will probably be experiencing something similarly unfortunate. I look forward to hearing their stories, because it is incredibly important to get NHS trusts to perform properly, serve their patients and look after their staff. Looking after the most vulnerable underpins everything we do in society, and I am afraid to say that the Government are not getting it right. That is what I am here to talk about.

Earlier, somebody not too far away from me said, “I think I am in the worst trust in the country,” and I said, “I will go round for round with you on that one.” Later, I will give some details about why I believe that.

Back in March, the then Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), announced that the Mid and South Essex trust would be placed into an intensive recovery programme, and we waited to find out the details. The reason for the programme is that, over several years, Mid and South Essex has been massively underperforming. There have been huge issues, and I do not exaggerate when I say that they fill my inbox every single day. We are talking about long waits, delays to treatment and difficulty accessing care. When patients do access care, they are not getting the service they need and, most importantly, they are not getting the outcomes they need and deserve.

I pay tribute to the staff who work at Broomfield hospital, in the Mid and South Essex trust and in all the trusts across the country. They are working in difficult circumstances, and quite a lot of the time they are using infrastructure that is not fit for purpose and has not been properly invested in over many years. They are doing their very best, but unfortunately, they are not getting the support they need. I have met the staff, patients and leadership of Mid and South Essex foundation trust many times over a sustained period, and I know hon. Members from across the House have done the same. Unfortunately, I believe it is one of the worst trusts in the country on both patient and staff measures. We pushed for changes locally, but national support is needed.

Let me talk about the range of issues that have been raised with me. I have walked around Broomfield hospital both with the senior leadership team and with the less senior leadership, shall we say? I do not think it should be possible for me to walk around a hospital and point out things that are so obviously wrong, yet I could. There were lights outside theatres that had not been working, I was told, for 10 years. Those are things that should be relatively easy to fix, but when patients have to write to me about mould growing on the walls and windows of a children’s ward, something is going seriously wrong.

Two weekends ago, an 80-year-old gentleman told my staff that he had queued out the door of the emergency department on a Saturday for an hour. He is in his 80s and nobody even bothered to offer him a seat. Something is going drastically wrong when we have lost sight of the importance of common decency and human compassion when looking after patients. When consultants retire, they are not being replaced, and their waiting lists are just being disbanded.

People are writing to me about those sorts of things all the time. Patients have very few ways to raise their concerns. They can go to the patient advice and liaison service, but unfortunately the delays in getting responses back from PALS are enormous. MPs can raise an issue with the trust leadership and go through PALS as well, but we still do not get the responses that we need. There seems to be a lack of communication between leadership and staff, and we seem to have lost sight of what is important—the things that just make sense to keep on doing.

There was a roundtable earlier this week for the leadership of Mid and South Essex and the Essex MPs whose constituencies are in that trust. While not all the MPs could come along—I know many sent their staffers—I was certainly there. We talked about heat and the very long, hot summer we have had. We talked about how that has impacted on the running of the hospital. The chief executive told me that it meant some of the theatres had to be closed because there was too much humidity. Obviously, that has a knock-on effect on patient waiting lists, outcomes and experiences.

The chief executive said that the hospital had been gifted some air-conditioning units by a very generous national company. That sounds great, but the hospital cannot plug enough of them in because the electrical circuits cannot cope. It is a fairly new build hospital—it is a combination of PFI and some older buildings—yet we cannot plug in enough air-conditioning units to keep our theatres open. I was told that humidity is not reduced by air-conditioning units, but I am not too sure about that. I am sure there are other ways of reducing humidity.

I said to the chief executive that it was a really hot summer, and with El Niño, we are possibly expecting an even hotter summer next year. I asked the chief executive whether they are developing contingency plans to make sure that we can deal with that, because we know that long, hot summers are going to keep on happening. He said, “No, we’re not.” My mind was blown that he said that out loud. I say this as gently and courteously as possible, but it is obvious that the trust is massively struggling. It is not just the staff working day to day; it is the leadership. It is a new leadership team, and they have obviously lost sight of the importance of focusing on certain things.

[Mr Richard Holden (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes some important points. We share a hospital trust. Many of my constituents in Basildon and Billericay go to Broomfield hospital. Some of them go down to Basildon hospital in the constituency of the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (James McMurdock), as well as the Southend hospital in another neighbouring constituency.

I want to pick up on that point around contingency planning, because Basildon hospital, which is part of the trust, is particularly bad for corridor care. It is very clear to me that it is a major issue that is really hammering people. I want to make a very brief point about that care.

[Mr Holden]

Thank you for your indulgence, Mr Stuart.

A constituent came to me who was handed a second-hand book on grief, with somebody else’s notes in it, after he had just lost his wife. It really struck me that, whether it is corridor care or that almost thoughtlessness, care is actually missing in parts of the Mid and South Essex NHS foundation trust.

[Marie Goldman]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to point out that we are in the same trust, and that our constituents experience each other’s local hospitals. I want to build on what he said about the experience of patients. It is really important that we remember the patients in all this. We can talk about financial planning, keeping budgets down and sticking within the envelope of how much we are supposed to be spending, but at the end of the day, it is patients who are suffering.

One patient wrote to me in February—it was February this year, but just to give an idea of how long this has been going on, it could have been February two, three or five years ago. They said:

“I waited four hours for triage, and it was eight hours until I was admitted to a ward. I spent much of that time sitting on the cold floor, by the open doors or standing as there were not enough seats.”

It is not just about patients; it is also about the staff who work there. A nurse wrote to me just last month, in September 2026, to say:

“I have worked at the trust since 2008 and when I first joined, I was so proud to say I worked there. The next few years this feeling remained but for the last 8 years or so things have definitely taken a nosedive. The trust seems to run on broken promises and the good will of front­line staff. I am no longer proud to say where I work. I know many staff feel the same and worry for the safety of the patients, the staff and the trust.”

Proportional Representation: General Elections

Debate between Richard Holden and Marie Goldman

Thursday 30th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

When I was out knocking on doors in my constituency in last year’s general election campaign, lots of people reminisced with me about a previous general election when the Liberal candidate came just 378 tantalising votes short of the incumbent Conservative. They spoke very fondly of that candidate, which might not be surprising, except the election that they were recalling was in 1983—over four decades ago.

I also remember speaking to an elderly, lifelong Labour voter who was lending me his vote for the very first time because he had to do something different. When I thanked him for placing his trust in me, he told me not to take too much from it, because his entire life he had never voted for a candidate who had won. I will always remember that conversation. As I walked away, I said, “Well, we’ll see about that.”

Until last July, for 74 years the constituency of Chelmsford, in its various shapes and sizes over the years, had never been represented in Parliament by anyone other than a Conservative. In fact, it had been 100 years since Chelmsford was last represented by a Liberal—something I am extremely proud to have corrected. It should not have to be this way. I hugely admire the tenacity of that erstwhile Labour voter who lent me his vote, hoping against all the evidence of his lifetime that this time it might make a difference.

No wonder turnout in elections is often so painfully low. Our antiquated first-past-the-post system can be incredibly demoralising, even for a committed political campaigner like myself. Believe it or not, I do not like having to ask people on the doorstep to lend me their vote so that, together, we can game the system to get the change that we want. Would it not better if people could cast their vote in a way that let them set out their preferences? They would know that all would not be lost for them if their first preference candidate did not win, as their vote could be transferred to someone else that they also would not mind seeing elected. The turnout in last year’s general election, as has already been alluded to, was 65.9% in Chelmsford, slightly better than the national turnout, which was a pretty poor 59.7%. In Manchester Rusholme, the turnout was just 40%. But these are dizzying heights compared with the turnout in local elections.

[Mr Richard Holden (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I appreciate that the hon. Lady is talking about a preferential voting system, rather than a proportional voting system. Does she understand that there is quite a big difference between those two options, and obviously today’s debate is about proportional representation?

[Marie Goldman]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I do not think those two things are mutually exclusive. There are preferential systems that can lead to proportional results. In fact, we see that in many places that use preferential systems.

In the election in May 2024 for the police, fire and crime commissioner in Essex, the turnout was barely 25%. So why are people not voting? Surely part of the issue is simply that they do not believe that their vote counts. They do not believe that they can make a difference. Although I do not completely agree with that, I certainly agree that the first-past-the-post system makes it harder.

There are also other things in our electoral system that make it harder, and I do not think that we should be talking about changing our voting system without also talking about them. For example, the introduction of voter ID was supposedly designed to enhance trust in our elections, but the evidence suggests that there have been some other consequences. In the 2024 general election, 4% of people who did not vote said that the voter ID requirement was the reason that they could not do so. Additionally, 0.08% of those who went to the polls were unable to cast their ballot because they did not have the correct ID. Those may seem like small figures, but if we put them into rough numbers, rather than percentages, we can see that, with about 28.9 million people casting their vote, the number of people who showed up who could not cast their vote because they did not have the correct ID was approximately—unless I have got my maths wrong—23,000 people. That is an incredibly high and quite shocking number.

Let us think about that for a moment—23,000 people could not vote because we wanted to stop voter fraud. Of course that might be a good idea if there was lots of voter fraud going on, but the Electoral Commission’s own website says:

“In the past five years, there is no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud. Of the 1,462 cases of alleged electoral fraud reported to police between 2019 and 2023, 11 led to convictions, and the police issued four cautions.”

Talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Voter registration is another area where improvements are needed. Research shows that as many as 8 million people across the UK are not registered correctly at their current address. This affects key groups such as young people, private renters and recent home movers who may not realise that they are missing from the register until it is too late. Although the current system allows for late registration before elections, this puts unnecessary pressure on electoral services and risks leaving some people unable to vote on polling day.

We can see the impact that even small barriers to voting can have. Imagine what would happen if we broke down those barriers and got rid of them. We must recognise that barriers to participation, including voter ID, voter registration and the voting system itself, are dangerous to our democracy. I urge the Government to take the opportunity to fix this and thereby to strengthen democracy and democratic engagement in our country.