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Welsh Affairs

I look forward to returning to that piece of history on another occasion, but now I want to talk about the present. I am a user of the NHS. All my children were born in NHS hospitals, except one who was born at home with the help of NHS staff. One of my children has had to spend consecutive Christmases in hospital, once in eastern Europe and once in the United Kingdom. The staff in both hospitals were superb—I have no complaint whatsoever about them—but the standards in a not particularly prosperous part of rural eastern Europe were at least as good as those in Abergavenny. In that hospital in rural Hungary my daughter had her own room, as did everyone else. There was always a doctor on the ward, never more than a few paces away, 24 hours a day. That is not the experience of people who come into contact with the NHS in the United Kingdom. So please let us not tell ourselves that the NHS is the envy of the world. It is not. There are problems with it, and we should not be blind to them. We should not allow ourselves to ignore any criticisms of the organisation of the NHS for fear of criticising the staff, and I should make it clear that I do not in any way criticise the staff. Let me give an example of how the health service is letting people down. Another of my constituents, 93-year-old Reginald Lewis, who is in the Severn View residential home in Chepstow, asked me to raise his case in the House today. He served in the armed forces, he has worked all his life, and he is paying his own fees at the nursing home of £1,700 a month. He has an open leg wound. He says that the nursing staff have been excellent in trying to treat him, but his condition is simply not getting better. He went to see a doctor, and was told—a 93-year-old man who had served in the armed forces—that he would have to wait six to 12 months before anyone from the NHS would even look at the wound or do anything about it. That is absolutely disgraceful. Finally, as issues affecting elderly people were rightly mentioned earlier, I shall now raise the issue of pensions. The Secretary of State was responsible, in one of his many previous guises, for setting up the Pension Protection Fund, which comes into effect when companies go bankrupt by, effectively, taking over the pension scheme and paying people 90 per cent. of their pension. It is not a bad idea to give the Secretary of State credit where it is due, and some is due in this instance, so I shall give it to him without any malice. However, he seems to have overlooked one important point: a lot of people whose companies went bankrupt and whose schemes were taken over by the PPF have been let down because prior to working in the companies that went bankrupt they had other jobs. Mrs. Jordan came to see me about this matter. She had worked for a different company for a number of years, and she transferred her pension rights into the new company, which then went bankrupt. It was taken over by the PPF and she was told she would get a pension of about 90 per cent., which is £13,000 a year. That was not good news for her, but neither was it a life-changing disaster. The PPF subsequently discovered a legal loophole, however, which allowed it to reduce her pension by the amount that had been paid in from the previous company, because when the PPF takes over a scheme, it takes over only that scheme, and only the pension rights paid directly into the company that has gone bankrupt are credited towards the individual, not any previous pension moneys from other companies that have been paid into the scheme of the company that has gone bankrupt. Effectively, therefore, Mrs. Jordan has been robbed of a large sum of her pension, and the capital money has gone to the PPF, which is using it for other things. I acknowledge that that point is a little complicated, but there will be many people who are in the same position as Mrs. Jordan in that they have lost out on money that should be rightfully theirs as a result of this loophole. We should not be using legal loopholes when dealing with paying people's pensions. We should be looking at what is right and fair, and doing the right thing by people. I have probably spoken for long enough, as I want every hon. Member who wishes to do so to be able to contribute. I shall conclude by echoing the words of a previous, well-known Labour leader. What will happen if Labour gets re-elected again? Based on the experience of my constituents, I warn you not to try to set up a business; I warn you not to try to better yourself by going to university or trying to get an apprenticeship; I warn you not to get ill; and I warn you not to get old.