---

Health and Education

I welcome this opportunity to debate the measures in Her Majesty's Gracious Speech. The proposals on health set out how we will expand patient choice, enhance quality, protect the health of young people and safeguard the values and principles of the NHS for future generations. The proposals on education will provide new powers to improve standards in schools, provide greater opportunities for young people and improve the local organisation of children's services to make them more responsive and accountable. The child poverty Bill will enshrine in legislation our intention to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Eleven years ago, the NHS was on its knees, after nearly two decades of neglect and underinvestment. In schools, only 35 per cent. of pupils achieved five or more good GCSEs, including English and maths, and the Conservative Government were preparing to introduce nursery vouchers for early-years provision that was scant and inadequate. Now, we see improved standards, nursery places for all three and four-year-olds, new schools and hospitals, reductions in mortality rates from the three big killers—heart disease, stroke and cancer—and the best ever A-level and GCSE results. By far the most damaging legacy of the previous Government was long waiting times, which delayed important surgery for many months and even years. By the end of 2008, no patient will need to wait more than 18 weeks from the time that they are referred by their GP for treatment, and the average wait will be no more than eight weeks. It is worth reflecting on the way that that enormous achievement by NHS staff has changed a mindset that became entrenched in the Conservative years. Only recently, a clinician at St. Thomas's was telling me about how, in 1994, her chief consultant took his medical team out to dinner to celebrate the fact that they had reduced the waiting times for hip replacements from five years to three years. The chief medical officer tells of elderly patients in the 1980s seeking to bequeath in their wills their places on the waiting lists to family members, having waited years for a cataract operation. That was the reality of life in the NHS under the Conservative party.