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Summer Adjournment

I wish to raise three subjects, and I shall end with the one on which the Government could act before 1 August. The first subject goes back some way to the unfair treatment of pensioners from this country who choose to live overseas. Many people believe that the arguments that successive Governments have used are wrong. Brian Havard of Australia has pointed out that he has lost £30,000 since he retired there. Another resident of Australia, aged 96, is getting a state pension from this country of £6 a week, but it would be £70 to £100 a week if she had chosen to go and live in the Philippines rather than in an old British dominion. I do not expect the Minister to be able to do more than to say that she has heard what I have said, but it is a scandal that gets worse with the passing years. It is time that Government woke up and said that whatever the other spending priorities may be, pensioners should get the same north of the 49th parallel as in the United States, in another European Union country or in South Africa. People should be treated fairly. The second issue is one to which I have given a great deal of time and attention. It is the proposed reconfiguration of hospitals in West Sussex. I pay tribute to the chairman of the primary care trust, David Taylor, who has resigned today for personal reasons. I do not believe that his resignation is linked to the fact that the health oversight committee yesterday referred the consultation to the Secretary of State on the grounds of inadequate and improper procedures. I accept what the chairman said and I wish him well. I suggest—although he is in my party—that the Government appoint as chairman of the PCT someone such as Henry Smith, the leader of West Sussex county council. He would approach the issues in a proper way. He has led the council well and he would be able to get the consultation halted and then put back on course properly. It is unprecedented for the first meeting of a joint health and oversight committee to take the action that that one did, and the Government should take it seriously. If they say that it is nothing to do with them and that the strategic health authority should make the decision, they should give direction to the chief executive of the SHA to try to get the consultation working properly. I shall not take the House through all the issues, but the representations made to the former Secretary of State for Health have not apparently been referred to the PCT as part of its consultation. The thousands of representations made to the PCT in the year that it took to come out with its inadequate consultation get no more than a passing reference. Many of the clinicians, including those who got standing ovations at the meeting in Worthing a few days ago, have made a declaration that the proposals were not safe, and that—apparently—has allowed others to claim that the clinicians are agreed that there can be only one major hospital on the south coast in West Sussex. The county of West Sussex has a population of 750,000 and there will be 3,000 births at Worthing hospital this year. The former Prime Minister, who thought it worth bypassing one’s local hospital for special primary angioplasty treatment, should know that if he wanted that treatment he could have it in Worthing, where our surgeons are of world renown. At a meeting of the all-party health group, some of us heard Professor Sir George Alberti and another Government adviser, Roger Boyle, agree with Mark Signy of Worthing hospital that treatment there is more likely to save a patient’s life than if they journeyed to hospitals in Brighton, Chichester or Portsmouth. The inadequacies of the consultation are well known locally and to the PCT, too. As an example, it was decided to recommend three options. A fourth was cut out at the last moment—my belief is that it was done on the instructions of the SHA or the Department of Health, but I cannot prove it. There has been some dispute as to whether the consultation document was submitted to the Department of Health for approval before it was released. It was certainly released later than anyone expected, but that is in the past so there is not much point in going over it again. The consultation should include an option for two hospitals with accident and emergency and maternity services. There are good arguments for Princess Royal hospital in Haywards Heath, but to make people decide between St. Richard’s hospital at Chichester and the Worthing and Southlands hospitals in my constituency is wrong. The fourth option—knocked out at the last moment—should have been included, which, like the first option, includes a benefit to the NHS of more than £20 million, but because it would be at Portsmouth in Hampshire it is not counted in the financial calculations. The Minister would have to look in a small box on page 7 of the fifth document attached to the seventh item of the PCT agenda to find it. The PCT should also be required to reinstate one of the Government’s accessibility hurdles, which was dropped in March without anybody noticing. I should be surprised if any non-executive directors of the PCT understood what was happening at the time. What is proposed is wrong. Worthing has one of the best hospitals in the country. People want to be patients there. Staff want to work there and people want to be trained there. I declare a slight interest, as my doctor daughter was trained at the hospital. My daughter is not the reason why I raise the next issue, which is the total mess of the Government’s nationalised scheme for choosing doctors for hospital training posts. In November and December 2006, there were warnings, in which I took part, that the modernising medical careers system and the computerised medical training application system—MTAS—would not work. In March, sensible directors of medical education advised deaneries that they should hold the system for a year and process applications manually. If that had happened, we would have known about almost every hospital position by May. Those positions are for the benefit not just of doctors in training but for patients. They also enable senior doctors to do their work properly rather than downgrading themselves to jobs that require less experience and skill. The Government did not heed those warnings. We have reached the stage of resignations—not only of the chairman of the BMA and of some of the people who helped design the system, but of the Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), who left her job for personal reasons, which we can well understand. The junior Minister responsible for some of those things has moved on to another post. The Select Committee on Health is to hold an inquiry and the Tooke inquiry is under way, but I should prefer Ministers to say, ““We realise the whole thing is a total mess. We went on regardless and we were wrong.”” The Minister will discover the strength of what is wrong if she asks Great Ormond street hospital whether it is true that it has up to 12 vacancies for posts that need to be filled on 1 August. We are used to flood warnings, but we are getting to the stage where we should put out a warning saying, ““Do not be ill in August.”” That is not just because people are changing their jobs everywhere in the country and many vacancies will not be filled, but because many of those that are filled will be filled by people who did not want to have that specialty in that place. Imagine what it is like to be one of the people who is actually given a job that they did want in a place that they wanted, only to be told two weeks after receiving that news, ““I am sorry; we made a mistake. We have offered six places for four posts, and two of you have to be picked to go elsewhere to do something totally different.”” That is not the way to treat a committed professional, on whom this country has spent perhaps £250,000. The same applies to people referred to as IMGs—international medical graduates: people who came to this country to do A-levels, their first degree and their medical training. As a result of a change of policy by the Home Office in March 2006, brought about apparently by the Department of Health either conniving or being ignorant about the consequences, those people found out that by late last year a decision had been taken, without full information to everyone who would be affected, that it was now not enough to have a letter from the Home Office in order to switch to the highly skilled migrant programme, and that a stamp in one’s passport was also required. Given the delays at the Home Office, one would not only have to have applied, having obtained the qualifications to get the FT3 grade that gets one above the salary level that makes it possible to apply for the highly skilled migrant programme, but would have to have got in the queue where they open the letter and put the stamp in. A letter from the Home Office was judged not to be adequate. What kind of a Government say that one Department can send a letter saying that a person is qualified whereas another can say, ““Unless you actually turn that letter into a stamp in your passport by 5 February, you cannot take up a job on 1 August””? I would be ashamed of that and I expect that, privately, both Ministers and the officials involved are ashamed. It is wrong. Some specialties, such as pediatrics and psychiatry, normally rely on international medical graduates. I suggest that the new Secretary of State goes down to the airport and tries to stop some of those people leaving the country. They may have been in this country for seven or eight years but they are needed here. I challenge the Government to publish during the next week, even though Parliament may have gone off on holiday, the figures for every deanery, hospital, specialty and grade, and to say where the gaps are and how many doctors are trying to enter the transfer system, where they can swap with someone else. For example, someone with a job in Scotland may want to be down in Kent. How can they swap? It is a shambles of a system and I am ashamed to be part of it. We as MPs have failed. On a different subject, during the break I am going to America to help win a clemency hearing for a man called Krishna Maharaj. The former Prime Minister mentioned him. Several members of the present Cabinet signed up to the amicus curiae brief signed by nearly 300 MPs and MEPs in the House of Lords. I hope that I can come back knowing that Florida will grant a clemency hearing to this man and have a full investigation. If he cannot be ordered a new trial, at least he can get the clemency hearing that he richly deserves.