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Private Sector (NHS)

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for her very helpful intervention. My local primary care trust has done a tremendous job in dealing with serious health problems in the locality. Luton has a degree of deprivation in certain areas, particularly affecting some of our minority populations, but the PCT has become a specialist at targeting such health problems. If the PCT is broken up and merged with others, we will lose that specialism; it will be dissolved into surrounding areas, which are quite different from Luton. Setting that to one side, however, the PCT has done a tremendous job in two respects. First, it has established a walk-in centre in the town centre, which has been a fantastic success. It sees 50,000 patients a year. There has been a shortage of GPs, which we were not able to address, but that facility is making up the gap. That is public enterprise and it is a real success. The PCT has also set up a treatment centre with qualified nurse practitioners, who take some of the burden off the accident and emergency department at the local hospital. It also has outreach programmes to do advanced primary care in the community. It is doing a fantastic job. The PCT has recruited 28 skilled nurses from outside the town. That additional capacity is all in the public sector and everything is done brilliantly. That is exactly what the Government said they wanted in the "Choosing Health" White Paper. The PCT is doing a tremendous job in difficult circumstances. It was even, until recently, able to overcome its financial difficulties, despite being £10 million a year below its fair funding target. It has had problems this year, along with many other PCTs throughout the country. However, the PCT will be forced to privatise those services, as well as all the other traditional services that it provides, because it will not be permitted to provide 19 Oct 2005 : Column 282WH direct services. Not only will the services be lost to the private sector; we must ask whether the private sector will be interested in dealing with poor people with difficult diseases and old people. I think not. It will be interested in what is profitable, and what is profitable is not necessarily what is needed. I asked my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister another question last week about Balfour Beatty, a private sector company that took over public sector work and has just been fined £10 million for negligence. I believe that it should have been prosecuted for corporate manslaughter, but we do not have a law governing that yet. That private culture will be inflicted on the health service as well as on our railways. That is wrong and should be reversed. We have had a brief debate so far. I will not say much more, although I could do. I am concerned about the impact on my constituents in Luton and, in particular, on the poor people of Luton who have serious health problems. They will suffer. We are rapidly moving towards the US system of health, whereby 40 million people have no health cover at all. When New Orleans was flooded, it took six days to get a single doctor into the city. That is what we are moving towards. I want a public health service that is committed to serving everyone at the point of need, whoever they are and whatever their circumstances. I have just attended and spoken at a meeting of ASLEF and I learned a new term for something that is particularly mad. ASLEF talks about something being "Dagenham, East"—two stops past Barking.