---

NHS Staffing

There has been no collusion between me and Front-Bench Members. That is most unlikely to be allowed in any case. However, my hon. Friend makes a fair point. One of the knock-on effects of the funding formula is that we do not have any cardiac rehabilitation worth mentioning at Kettering hospital. People have to go to Bedfordshire to get it. They describe the problem as a postcode lottery, but I disagree. If it were a postcode lottery, my constituents would have a chance of winning now and again. However, it is not a lottery but a decision made in Whitehall to underfund the people in my area and the east midlands. We heard earlier that much more money will be spent on NHS staff in Scotland than in other parts of the country. Spending on the NHS constitutes one of the largest parts of public expenditure. It is alleged that the NHS is the third biggest employer in the world. It was said that only the Red Army and Indian Railways employ more people. Unfortunately, that is not true. Now that Indian Railways has been privatised, the NHS has moved up to second place, and I daresay the Red Army is being cut back. I hoped that the Under-Secretary would tell me how many times the former Chancellor had had to go into a darkened room and bang his head against a wall to try to solve the problem. She probably did not want to divulge that information. Something about the NHS surprised me on Saturday. I visited a part of my constituency called Great Doddington for a public meeting—it would probably be characterised as a town hall meeting—to complain about the rotten fact that the post office there had been closed and that that was wrong. More than 100 people attended. However, the meeting was led by a local GP and the effect of the revised GP contract negotiations on staffing came up. Out-of-hours services are affected. I appreciate that that might be a problem in other parts of the country, but in my area we still have an out-of-hours service, which works well. It is called Keydoc and if one is desperate to see a GP in the middle of the night, as I was a little while ago—[Interruption.] I thank my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) for passing me a note asking me to wind up as quickly as possible because people are getting bored. [hon. Members: ““No!””] Keydoc is a very good system that provides out-of-hours cover; indeed, I used it only recently for my son. We therefore do not have a problem with out-of-hours cover in our area—it may be a problem in other parts of the country—but local GPs are up in arms about the money that will be taken away from them because they are not prepared to enter into the Government's new GP contract. Some local GPs even feel that their practices will have to close if the contract comes into existence. Finally, I appreciate that the Government are trying to do what they can to manage the NHS. The fact that we would manage it much better is neither here nor there at the moment because there will not be an election for a couple of years. However, there is one thing that I can say. There is not a single complaint about the number of NHS nurses or doctors in the hospital in my constituency or about the service that people receive. Instead, people are absolutely livid that we do not even have a hospital in my constituency. The Minister has graciously agreed to come to the area to discuss the issue—and the day that she has chosen is April fools' day.