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Summer Adjournment

I am delighted to participate in the summer Adjournment debate—I shall do so briefly in view of the many hon. Members who want to speak. I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary on the Front Bench and, indeed, the hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara). The hon. Gentleman and I have an engagement to attend together at 6.30 this evening, so I am confident that the debate will finish on time. I want to raise three issues. The first is the pathway project in my constituency. I am proud that we have a Labour Government who have allocated more money to the health service than any other Government in history. I am proud that the amount of money that we have spent trickles down to local communities. We have several impressive local improvement finance trust schemes and new doctors’ surgeries, and waiting times have been cut. Imagine my disappointment and that of other hon. Members who represent Leicester and Leicestershire when the hierarchy of the health authority came to see us last week to announce that the pathway project—a £700 million project to rebuild and refurbish our three major hospitals in the city of Leicester—was to be shelved. The reason given was that Triskelion, the private sector partner, had decided to increase the price of the pathway from £711 million and to charge the health authority an additional £201 million. The chief executive of the health authority, Peter Reading, and the chairman of the strategic health authority decided that it was far too much to spend and that it would not represent value for money. In the spirit of all-party consensus, the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) and I went to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), who was then Secretary of State for Health, a few months ago because of our concerns about the delays in the completion of the pathway project. It is a tragedy that the rebuilding and refurbishment, which would have transformed health services in Leicester and Leicestershire, will not now take place. It is a tragedy because, for seven years, local Members of Parliament and the public were presented with a vision of what underlay the pathway project. I am disappointed because we have no firm commitment from the health authority and those who advise it about future plans for redeveloping our hospitals. I hope that Ministers will understand the concerns of not only the local Members of Parliament but the local communities about what appears to me to be a misuse of public funds. We want especially to know what has happened to the £23 million of taxpayers’ money that went towards paying for the consultants and others who have produced no hospitals and no new health service. I hope that when my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary replies, she will give me three assurances about the pathway project. First, we want to be assured that the £711 million that was originally allocated will remain in the health service in Leicester and that there is no question of it going elsewhere. Secondly, we want to be assured that the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw) will meet Members of Parliament from the Leicestershire area in the next few weeks. I appreciate that it is traditional when we are in recess for Ministers to take their holiday—rightly; they deserve it—and for Members of Parliament to be busy with constituency and other parliamentary business. However, I am prepared to return to Westminster—and I know that that applies to my colleagues—to meet the Minister because, having been told about the decision, we feel that it is important to know what will happen in future. Thirdly, I hope that we will find out what has happened to the money that has already been spent on the local health service. Where has the £23 million gone? We can then justify to local people what has happened to their money.