NHS (Government Spending)
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Dr Poulter
To take the intervention in the spirit in which it was intended, I recognise that the hon. Gentleman is committed to our NHS, as are Members on this side of the House. That commitment to and investment in the NHS has been made clear by the fact that we have increased NHS spending by £12.7 billion during this Parliament.
Opposition Members have also incorrectly asserted that our long-term economic plan is taking Britain back to the 1930s, but the latest forecast from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility shows that our plans would reduce total Government spending as a share of GDP from some 40% today to 35.2% by the end of the next Parliament in 2020—the same levels of public spending as were proposed under Labour in 2002, when the right hon. Members for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) and for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) were in the Treasury. If it was appropriate to set public spending at that level under Labour when they were in government, they need to explain why it is somehow wrong for a Conservative-led or coalition Government to plan for a similar level of public expenditure in the future—something that the Labour party has completely failed to do to date.
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
The Minister referred to the goodbye note from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne). Would the Minister’s goodbye note say, “Good luck, there’s no NHS”?
Dr Poulter
Such drivel, frankly, is beneath the hon. Lady. We have made considerable additional investment in the NHS. Comparisons between an NHS run by a coalition Government in England and the NHS in Wales bear up very well for the NHS in England.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(10 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I hope that he will be reassured that under the current Government, clostridium difficile and MRSA rates are both about 50% lower than they were under the previous Government. We will continue to make sure that we reduce unacceptable hospital infections.
Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
T2. Following Francis and Keogh, and in creating a more open and accountable NHS, will the Secretary of State, in the spirit of total transparency that he favours, order foundation trusts to publish all their board papers, have exactly the same publishing requirements as non-FTs, and hold all their board meetings in public?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)
T6. Does the Secretary of State believe that making data on individual consultants public is pointless if hospitals are using informal mechanisms to frustrate patient choice, such as having a team of specialist nurses decide which consultant a patient is referred to? Will he reinforce patient choice and dissuade hospitals from doing that?
Dr Poulter
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight the fact that we need more transparency in data and that patients have a right to know about the quality of surgical care, but it is also right that we need to look at that carefully across the different surgical specialties, and particularly at the different criteria that might also impact upon good care and good health care outcomes, particularly in oncology.
National Health Service
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron). He would be surprised if I agreed with everything he said, but he made some good points in the first half of his speech.
Today’s debate has been a wasted opportunity for the Opposition, because nothing positive has come out of it—nothing about how we will better look after patients or how we will address very real needs in all our constituencies. There has been a lot of mud-slinging but very little talk about what will benefit patients and how we will deliver a patient-centred NHS.
That is to the detriment of the Opposition and to the way in which they have addressed the motion. It is disingenuous of Opposition Members to attack the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health, and to try to give the impression that my right hon. Friends do not care about the NHS. All politicians and, I believe, everyone in the country care about the NHS, but we have slightly different views about how the service should be run.
I have a great deal of time for the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) and I like her very much on a personal level, but some of her points were wrong. In particular, it was wrong to bring the Prime Minister’s personal experience into the debate. He had a difficult family circumstance, and of course someone with that background will understand the NHS very well.
Dr Poulter
The hon. Lady did not make her point very well, and she did not allow me to intervene on her. I am sure that the Minister will address the points that she made about the letter.
Health and Social Care (Re-committed) Bill
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Rosie Cooper
I would suggest that it is a failing model, and not one that we should be looking at.
I should like to look at the idea of risk pooling, in which Monitor will have a role. Monitor will be required to top-slice the budgets of foundation trust hospitals to obtain that pool of money. The problem is that if the trust is already in financial difficulty, the fact that Monitor needs to top-slice the FT hospital’s budget could tip it into being unsustainable, and then Monitor would have to act. Does that not seem back to front? It needs looking at. If the foundation trust is unsustainable, Monitor has a duty to take action, yet Monitor may well have precipitated the situation; there seems to be a conflict at the core of that relationship. There is no clarity about how top-slicing will be calculated, or what it will involve. Will the Secretary of State please comment on that?
I shall bring my comments to a close with a quotation that I used in a speech I gave a while ago. In “This Week”, Michael Portillo was asked by Andrew Neil why the Government had not told us before the general election about their plans for the NHS. He replied:
“Because they didn’t believe they could win the election if they told you”—
the public—
“what they were going to do. People are so wedded to the NHS. It’s the nearest thing we have to a national religion—a sacred cow.”
He could not have been more clear. The Government intended to misrepresent their position and mislead voters. I believe that this is the latest stage of that misrepresentation, and the Government must be held to account if they force the Bill through in its current form.
Dr Poulter
I was hoping to begin on a more consensual note, picking up on a few things that have been said around the Chamber on which I thought we could all agree. However, I will first remind the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) of why the Government are introducing this Bill. We do have problems in the NHS. Far too much money—about £5 billion a year—is wasted on bureaucracy and could be much better spent on front-line patient care. Over the past 10 years, the number of managers in the NHS has doubled, going up six times as fast as the number of front-line nurses; the hon. Lady is very concerned about that. A lot of things need to change in the NHS so that the service can become more patient-focused and patient-centred. That is why we are making these changes and why the reforms in this Bill have to go through the House.
Particularly important—this has come out of the pause for reflection and the Future Forum report—has been an increased focus on one of the key challenges for the health service and for adult social care: better care of our growing older population. People are living a lot longer and living longer with multiple medical conditions, or co-morbidities as they would be termed in medical parlance. That is a very big human challenge for the NHS, and also a very big financial challenge. We must have a service that better meets and better responds to those challenges. The pause for reflection has led to much more focus on improved integration of care, and that will be very much to the benefit of the older patients and frail elderly whom we all care about.
We have had a lot of discussion about the benefits, or otherwise, of using the private sector. The case for the private sector may have been made much more eloquently by Labour Members than by members of the Government. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) argued that because the previous Government used the private sector to reduce waiting times, it was effectively used to improve patient care for patients with cataracts and for those needing hip operations or waiting for heart operations. That, in itself, was a good thing, but the problem was that the previous Government used the private sector far too much in a way that allowed it to make profits but not to look towards the integrated care that Government Members would like to see as a result of these health care reforms. As regards looking after the frail elderly, for example, there was cherry-picking of hip operations as part of orthopaedics but without the follow-up care that was required—the physiotherapy, occupational therapy and social services that those older people so badly needed. Yes, the private sector can bring value and benefits to the NHS, as the previous Government recognised, but it has to be done in an integrated way, and that is what we will do as a result of these health care reforms.
Why else do we need to reform the NHS? Are we really happy with the status quo?
NHS Reorganisation
Debate between Rosie Cooper and Dan Poulter(13 years, 1 month ago)
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