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Education and Health

It is a great privilege to be able to come to this Dispatch Box for the first time as Secretary of State for Health, after six and a half years as shadow Secretary of State. I thank the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) for his kind words about me and my team. I am very proud of the team that we have at the Department of Health. I was proud when the Prime Minister spoke of us in warm terms today, and we will fulfil the responsibilities that he has placed on us. Let me say to the right hon. Gentleman, in return, that I thank him, on behalf of the NHS, for his commitment. From the days when he began as a Minister in the Department and then went, as it were, back to the shop floor, I think that nobody has doubted his personal commitment to improving standards in the NHS, nor, indeed, that of his outgoing ministerial team. He is on his own in the shadow health team—[Interruption.] Oh, I beg their pardons. However, he has lost his fellow Ministers. I will not go on at length, but I know that they were all committed to their jobs. I want especially to mention Ann Keen. As a nurse, she showed her personal commitment to the NHS and to nursing as a profession. My colleagues, including the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), and I will ensure that we continue the work of identifying how we can take nursing forward as a profession. That includes the work that she and the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), have done in looking at nursing as a profession for the future. As Secretary of State, it is my privilege to be able to represent those who work in the national health service. We have reason, all of us, to be grateful to them every day. People in Cumbria, especially today, have reason to be grateful to the north-west ambulance service, to local GPs, and to those who work in North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, particularly those at West Cumberland hospital, whom I have twice visited. I know the responsibility that they feel, even on a day-to-day basis, for providing hospital care—acute care—to patients across that part of Cumberland, which is at a great distance from other hospital locations. I know that people in Cumbria will be deeply grateful for the service that they have provided to look after them today. It is a privilege for the shadow Secretary of State and I to respond to this debate, which has included 23 maiden speeches and, indeed, some fine speeches by Members who are not new. Before I respond to those speeches in detail, I want to say that it was very encouraging to hear the commitment to improving quality expressed on both sides of the House. It was particularly encouraging to hear my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and other Members on these Benches demonstrate that what we need to achieve that quality is a change from a command-and-control, top-down system of running our schools, hospitals, health care and social care services to one that is built on standards of delivering quality. We need to understand that if we are really going to achieve that, we have to give parents greater choice and control over the education that their children receive. We have to give patients greater information, choice and control over the health care that they receive, and in all the public services that we are talking about, we must provide those who deliver them with a much greater sense of ownership. It is all very well for the right hon. Member for Leigh to talk about what has been achieved in the NHS over recent years, and I have never been one to diminish what has been achieved. However, many who work in the service, notwithstanding the fact that they are better paid than they were and know that they have had an unprecedented increase in resources to deliver improvements, still feel demoralised and that they are not in control of the service that they provide. They cannot give the care that they want to give, and they know that they are not yet matching the standard of care that they could achieve given the opportunity to do so. It is our responsibility to make that happen and I do not doubt the commitment of Government Members to do so. I visited 62 constituencies during the general election campaign and, without exception, I met candidates who were committed to delivering improvements in health care, not least because in many cases they had personally campaigned for years to deliver improvements in health care services. That is why we will not let Labour's debt crisis, which we have inherited, mean that we cut the NHS and make the sick pay. When the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State, he commissioned McKinsey to go off and publish a report. It produced a report for him stating that on average, something like 10% of those employed by a provider of health care with 300 staff should be taken away, mostly clinical staff. That was the recommendation given this March to my predecessor as Secretary of State, but that is not the way we should go. We must move towards a change in priorities from a service that was increasing the number of managers three times as fast as the number of nurses to one that deploys clinical staff on the front line to deliver the care that patients need.