---

Armed Forces Personnel

The Minister knows his parliamentary technique, but he well knows that as the Opposition have no idea when the election will be called and what the state of public finances and our commitments will be then, we will never be involved in those budgetary debates. We look to the Government currently in charge, who are raising taxes from the current UK working population and have responsibility for the armed forces, to discharge their duty properly while they are in office. When we come into office, which will not be a day too soon, we shall make sure that we deal with the issues at far greater speed than the Government in their ““overnight”” 10 years. The medical issue of greatest concern for military personnel and their families is the quality of care they receive if they are injured on operations. As I have a medical background, when I visited the Shaibah logistics base I looked intensively at the quality of care being provided. I concur with the Minister: the quality of care would not have been out of place in most district general hospitals in the UK. I spoke to an NHS surgeon who had been seconded to Shaibah and had decided to join the Army as a consequence of being able to treat his patients when he wanted without interference from managers and with no Government-applied targets. He said into the bargain that in the three years they had been operating in Shaibah there had not been a single case of MRSA. Perhaps the NHS might want to learn from the excellent record of those working in our forward bases. I note that the Select Committee on Defence is visiting Selly Oak hospital today to examine the provision of care. During my visit to the hospital I was highly impressed by the quality of medical care, although the House is obviously well aware from cases highlighted in the media that other elements of the care were criticised by families. I fully accept that injured personnel must be treated where there is access to a wide range of specialist services—orthopaedic, burns, plastic, reconstruction and so on. The reduced size of our armed forces makes separate military hospitals utterly unviable, but there is absolutely no reason why we cannot have exclusively military units at Selly Oak. A military-managed unit is not enough. We want service personnel to be able to recover from their injuries securely, in the knowledge that those around them understand what they have been through, which cannot happen when there is a mixture of military and civilian patients. It is not good enough. Such conditions are particularly important for those who have suffered mental as well as physical trauma.