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Health and Education

No, I am finishing in a few moments. There are many other issues to which the Secretary of State should devote herself in this Parliament, but I am not going to cover them all. My apologies to the House and to my hon. Friends if I have left out specific issues. During the 2001 general election, the Government announced that they would have 10,000 more doctors and 20,000 more nurses, but we did not hear a peep from them about those objectives during the recent campaign. It was the Conservatives who set out clearly how they could deliver 20,000 more doctors, 30,000 more nurses and 30,000 more allied health professionals. If the Secretary of State and the Government are keen to increase capacity in the NHS—and I hope that they are—they must learn from what we have been saying. The private sector must be used more efficiently and fully, but the total health care capacity in this country must also be increased, and that means more doctors and nurses. More resources must be put in and we have set out how that could happen, not just through to 2007–08, but to 2009–10 as well. Resources in the NHS must be used more efficiently. The Office for National Statistics has shown that there has been an 8 per cent. reduction in productivity in the NHS since 1997, but what does that mean in practice? The number of finished consultant episodes—that is, in effect, the number of operations carried out in hospitals—rose by 26 per cent. between 1990–91 and 1996–97, but by only 14 per cent. in the six years since 1997. My right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) was responsible for part of the rise between 1990–91 and 1996–9—and if that trend had been maintained, the NHS would be performing 1.4 million more operations a year. The Secretary of State announced with some fanfare that she was going to buy 1.7 million more operations from the private sector in the next five years. If the earlier productivity rate in the NHS had been maintained, we would have had 1.4 million more NHS operations every year. That is the difference, and the key to the problem.