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Department of Health

The debate is timely because, as my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands (Charlotte Atkins) has already pointed out, last week our local hospital, the University hospital of North Staffordshire, published its plans to tackle its financial deficits. I hope that the House will bear with me as I focus on the same subject, although I shall take a different tack from that taken by my hon. Friend and neighbour, even though I share her ambitions for the NHS in our area. Ours is, I believe, the first of the 18 so-called turnaround trusts to announce its financial recovery plan, although I understand that the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust has made an announcement today. Whatever one thinks of its record, the Shropshire and Staffordshire SHA is now certainly leading the way. The cuts announced in North Staffordshire last week affecting up to 1,200 workers make gruesome reading, and they have already had a devastating effect on morale. They include 573 nurses, midwives and nursing auxiliaries—one in five of all nursing staff. In total, one in six of the hospital’s dedicated and hard-working staff will go if the plans go through. It is true that the 18 trusts singled out in the NHS hall of shame are a small minority of NHS trusts, and the projected deficit of approximately £800 million is only a small percentage of total annual spending, which has    grown enormously for the benefit of patients everywhere in the country, but the problems exemplified by the situation at my local hospital point to an NHS that is creaking at the seams—in some places, but by no means all—because so much change is happening all at the same time. Even if eyes have been taken off the ball—amid all the change in my area, they certainly have—what is important now is that the response to tackle the deficits must not veer out of control. The brutal announcement in North Staffordshire last Thursday, however, appears to provide some evidence of a system in panic—or, in my patch at least, of a response calculated to cause political panic. Either way, the consequences are appalling for staff and for people’s confidence in our local NHS. I am afraid to say that the document issued to staff last Thursday was a disgrace both in content and tone, whatever apologists say about the legal requirement for statutory 90-day notice of redundancy. The document was predicated on the fact that we must save £43 million over two years—to put it crudely, every £1 million means that 30 jobs will go. However, we are talking about a hospital, not a business going bankrupt, and that is no way to secure the good will of staff, which is the basis on which much of the NHS operates. Staff representatives from Unison, the Royal College of Nursing and other trade unions are rightly up in arms because, in many respects, the hospital was allowed to drift in a relatively short period by its board, by the SHA, whose chief executive was replaced last autumn and, ultimately, by the NHS executive. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), I am certainly not a softy or an apologist for poor management by the hospital itself. At a time of immense change and huge investment, the hospital was allowed the luxury of letting its former chief executive, David Crowley, serve 13 months’ notice before leaving for personal reasons. The NHS is not a business, but it needs to be run to the exacting standards demanded elsewhere, and I complained that that symptomatic drift would not be acceptable in other organisations. After 13 months, in August last year, the hospital appointed only an acting chief executive, Peter Blythin, who was shifted in January, with the obligatory warm words, to another part of the NHS. In the meantime, the wake-up call came loud and clear last November, when the trust announced a doubling to £18 million of its predicted deficit for the current financial year. The bell tolled deafeningly with the resignation of the chairman and all the non-executive directors only three days before Christmas—just the sort of festive present that people do not want. Since then, local MPs have tried to get to the bottom of the hospital’s £18 million deficit. As late as mid-February, at a meeting in Parliament, the SHA could not provide us with all the details and assumptions that we needed, but they are crucial, given the vagaries of NHS accounting. It promised to do so, but out of the blue came last Thursday’s news: £43 million of savings are now planned over two years, with calamitous consequences for staff. Despite those consequences, the statement and plan were issued on no higher authorisation than that of the hospital’s acting chief executive. They were not issued on the authorisation of the SHA board or, as far as I am aware, the Department of Health.