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Welsh Affairs

That is not something of which the hon. Gentleman should be proud. Indeed, he should be ashamed of it. It is not that the health service is in an especially good state in England, simply that it is worse in Wales. In many rural areas, getting an ambulance is like waiting for Godot. Recently, a lady in my area made a 999 call for an ambulance. It turned up three hours later because the drivers had no satnav or maps, and got lost. By the time they arrived at her house, they had run out of fuel. They wanted her husband to fill a billycan with petrol so that they could get the lady to a hospital. That disgraceful anecdote about the ambulance service is only of many that I could tell. Even more worrying is the second-class treatment suffered by many people in Wales on the waiting lists. A gentleman called Vincent Davis, a constituent of mine, was diagnosed in 2001 with a rare form of cancer and told that he was terminally ill. He was treated at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead with yttrium octreotide therapy. Three cycles of that reduced his tumour by 50 per cent. and gave him several extra years of life with his family. When his cancer returned, he went back to see his doctor in Wales. His consultant, Mr. Caplin—one of the UK’s leading experts in that particular form of cancer—sent him a letter. My constituent was shocked to be told that the health authority would not fund his treatment because he was living in Wales. I took up the matter with Health Commission Wales, which said that it was not prepared to fund my constituent’s treatment because it had not been approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Subsequently, I showed the commission a letter from NICE’s chief executive, Andrew Dillon, stating that the Department of Health had indicated that it was"““not acceptable for local trusts to use the absence of NICE guidelines as an excuse for not prescribing treatments.””" However, that applies only in England—the Welsh Assembly does its own thing and has said that it will not pay for treatment not approved by NICE. The treatment that my constituent needs costs £15,000. Health Commission Wales is prepared, in effect, to sentence a man to death for that amount of money by saying that it is not prepared to offer treatment that has not been approved by NICE. That is despite the fact that one of the UK’s leading cancer specialists maintains that the treatment works, and that it has worked on this gentleman in the past. That is a shocking state of affairs, and proves that the NHS does not extend to the UK’s regions, where people get a second-class health service.