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Health Care in London

I think we are still on an amber light. I am still very hopeful that a green light may well at some point be able to be flashed on. However, I cannot give the hon. Gentleman any firm commitment just yet, but he has made representations to me. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire has moved a motion on which the House will vote. I give him credit for knowing the NHS well, but that is why I am so concerned with the motion's vacuity. He accepted stroke reconfiguration in Cambridgeshire because he knew that it was necessary and it was clinically led. The indictment of him is that he knows that the Darzi review is right but it is politically difficult. It requires courage to change London's NHS and save lives, and for there to be a credible alternative Government, there needs to be an Opposition party that comes up with a credible alternative if it criticises Darzi. Change is always difficult, but across the country the hon. Gentleman has not opted for the process of improving the NHS; he has taken the opportunist line. Let us examine where we have made changes. The hon. Gentleman knows well that the NHS in Calderdale and Huddersfield has reconfigured its maternity services and is giving mothers and babies safer care, but his party would reverse that. In Manchester, the reorganisation of paediatric services is giving children safer, better care, but it appears that his party wants to overturn it. In Birmingham and Sandwell, the new hospital would not be there and patients would not be getting safer, better care without change, but his party opposes change in that area. Change is difficult: it requires courage and judgement. In each of the cases I mentioned the Government have made the judgment and have made the change. We have had the courage to lead. We have created a bottom-up process that saves lives. The hon. Gentleman is committed to reversing that for the sake of political expediency, thus sacrificing patients for marginal seats. The clinicians wanted change to save lives and improve the quality of care. He wanted votes, and he seeks to obtain them by scaring people into a conservative view on opposing change. I do not deny that it is easy to scare people and that seats can be won in that way—that has been done—but leaders do not do that. People who care about the NHS do not do that. We have not done that; we have made the change, we are improving the NHS and as a result of those changes we are going to be saving lives that will, if this process is stopped, be put at risk. We are prepared to make the change; the Conservatives are not the change.