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Department of Health

I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Derek Scott, who was the Prime Minister’s former adviser, said;"““Gordon has frittered away the best inheritance left to any Chancellor in living memory.””" In 1997, with the strongest economy in Europe, there was an unprecedented opportunity to transform health care in this country. Let us face it—the money has gone in. Spending has increased and, perhaps, as some have argued, it took a Labour Government to do that. It is even more true, however, that it will take a Conservative Government to bring back value for money for patients; to put health care, not cost savings, at the top of the priority list; and to ensure that we return to having care close to home, which no longer appears in White Papers. In 2000, under the NHS plan, those of us involved in fighting for community hospitals were told, ““You’re saved. It’s okay.”” What has happened? More than 1,500 beds have closed in community hospitals in this country. We then had the astonishingly named document, ““Keeping the NHS Local””. When I first came across it, I found it fascinating. I wondered whether it was a sideline, but I discovered that it was the Government’s primary policy paper on health, against which everything should be measured. Members can imagine my shock when, new to this House, I found that my local services were being cut. They can imagine how that was compounded, although I was initially joyous, when the White Paper came out. A new Secretary of State was saying that no community services or facilities must close because of short-term budgetary pressures. She said at the Dispatch Box, where the Minister is currently smiling and laughing, that that should not happen. Across the country, it is happening. Between 1999 and 2003, spending increased by almost 30 per cent. The number of hospital treatments—Labour Members are quick to intervene but, strangely, they are not doing so now—went up by just 5 per cent. Ministers of this Government are grinning at that failure. Productivity has fallen and, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire has said, the impact has fallen on the most vulnerable and ill in our society. Recently, there was the case of Mena Rising, who was terminally ill in Westbury hospital. Despite the White Paper, the local primary care trust decided that that hospital must close. At five days’ notice, because it had budgets to balance—let us remember the words of the health White Paper, which, as I said earlier, people now see as a sick joke—all the patients were moved. A check was done on Mena Rising, however, to see whether her GP was wrong to say that, as she was terminally ill, she should not be moved. They could not overcome that assessment, so she was allowed to remain alone in that hospital. All the other patients were moved on a Sunday and she died on the following Thursday. That is the reality of new Labour’s NHS. The failure to deliver value for money is a result of the failure of the Labour party to take as much care over spending as it does over the accompanying soundbites. This Government need to stop blaming managers for systemic failures that derive directly from their policy. They need to face up to the fact that never in the history of British government has so much been wasted by so few.