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Sir Rhodes Boyson: I must not be diverted from my speech by my hon. Friend.
The Labour party is making a bad mistake by pretending that it will continue with grant-maintained schools while pursuing a policy of wiping out their independence. I pay tribute to Sir Robert Balchin, the chairman of the Grant-Maintained Schools Foundation.
The Prime Minister mentioned doubling the number of assisted places. The scheme has been very successful. I steered it through the House and used to argue with one Opposition Member about its introduction. Some 30,000 children now have places on that scheme. Those children come from some of the most deprived homes in the country and attend some of the finest schools. If that is not reverse discrimination--which I believe the Labour party once believed in--I do not know what is. It is a good scheme that takes children from poor homes and places them in some of the best schools in the country. There are five applications for every one of the 30,000 places on the assisted places scheme.
It is interesting that three out of five Labour voters in a MORI poll held last year wanted the assisted places scheme to continue. I am not here to help the Labour party win the next general election. If it continues with its current policies, it will be damaged. I do not want it to win the next election, but I do not want to see it damaged. The next general election will be fought on such issues. As three out of five Labour voters want the assisted places scheme to continue, unless Labour wants to lose the general election it would be remiss to continue with its present policies. Perhaps it wants to lose the general election because it has become so used to being in opposition that it wants to remain there. There are certain advantages in doing so: it can grumble about everything without taking responsibility for anything.
The sort of people who take advantage of the scheme are bus drivers, nurses, clergymen, postal workers and divorced mothers. They send their children to some of the best schools in the country, and their ability to do so is not based on income. The average income of the families of children on the assisted places scheme is only
£10,975--60 per cent. of them earn less than £10,000.
The scheme does not give money to the rich, but takes people from the bottom of society's economic pile and gives them the best opportunities.
Mr. Marshall:
Will my right hon. Friend confirm the statement made in the letters column of today's The Times that almost all the schoolchildren who participate in the assisted places scheme go on to win places at university?
Sir Rhodes Boyson:
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I believe that the figure is 90 per cent., which may be higher than the number of students from Eton who go on to university. If the Labour party wipes out the assisted places scheme, many people will register their disapproval at the ballot box. I shall certainly give them the opportunity to do so by making sure that Labour's policy is public knowledge.
I had thought that the Labour party was becoming more realistic in its views--after all, Labour Members are quite pleasant people. However, this week I read a statement by the Labour education spokesman proposing to phase out A-levels. We can have three-year degree courses in this country only if we also have A-levels. We have the shortest degree courses in the world because the second year in the sixth form is equivalent to the first year at university. If A-levels are wiped out, we will have to spend more money providing four and five-year degree courses. A-levels are the gold standard of British education and I was amazed to read the Labour spokesman's statement. I hope that it will be denied during the debate today and that Labour Members will admit that they made a mistake by failing to read the small print or something like that.
We need a vocational certificate in Britain that is equivalent in status to academic A-levels. That is what our European friends have--I am a Eurosceptic, but I must be friendly to Europe in this debate on the Queen's Speech. Like Europe, we must have a certificate on the technological side that is equivalent to the academic side.
At the beginning of my speech I said that the economy is improving--and we have seen signs of that in the past two days. I think that the Government could show their faith in the future by using any available money to increase Christmas bonuses for pensioners. Today's pensioners suffered the unemployment of the 1930s--it was particularly bad in the north country where I come from--and they suffered through the war. I was a social security Minister and every year we talked about doing something for pensioners. If there is any money available in the Budget arising from reductions in taxation and so on, the Government could improve pensioners' Christmases by increasing the bonus to £50--or £100 if the economy continues to boom.
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich):
I hope that the right hon. Member for Brent, North (Sir Rhodes Boyson) will forgive me if I do not follow him in all the twists and turns of his carefully structured speech.
Sir Rhodes Boyson:
I spent the whole of my life teaching in the state system and I was educated in the state system. I want to see the state system flourish rather than being ruined by the Labour party.
Mrs. Dunwoody:
That is exactly my point.
Mr. John Marshall:
Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Dunwoody:
No. The hon. Gentleman has just entered the Chamber and he must take his own chances.
This morning the Secretary of State talked at considerable length about the great advantages of a public school education. I am afraid that I did not enjoy those advantages and my constituents must listen to the product of the state school system speaking in what I regard as fairly clear and understandable English. I do not regard my state school education as a disadvantage.
I would have appreciated an equal amount of plain speaking from the Secretary of State this morning. He took a long time to say very little about the future of the national health service. For many people, the reality is not what we heard from the Secretary of State this morning: the reality is that the health service is run by increasingly overworked staff who have very low morale. They are very worried about their inability to provide the level of care that they were trained to administer and many doctors and nurses do not see a clear pattern of development in their professions in the future.
When discussing what is occurring in the NHS, we should recognise that some of the best ideas are subverted not because there is anything wrong with the core decision to change the way in which health service provision works, but because the resources and the staff are not available to deliver the necessary level of care.
I shall spend a few minutes discussing the provision of care in the community in my constituency. Cheshire has not done well in the spending assessments and there are very real differences between Cheshire and comparable counties. That has meant that those who provide care services face a continuing battle to balance the amount of money with demand for services.
That is the depressing aspect of the debate. My constituents know what is happening in health care provision; they see it every day. They see the pressures on hospitals and the fact that fundholding general practitioners have access to large amounts of money-- which they occasionally do not spend correctly--while other GPs have to argue and fight in order to secure the same level of attention for their patients. That is not providing an improved health system: that is a simple two-tier system.
The Secretary of State knows the right words to use, but he cannot disguise the real situation. The Government are very good at using weasel words to disguise the real state of health care in this country. I will give way to the Secretary of State if he believes that he has not had enough time to debate the subject this morning.
Mr. Dorrell:
The hon. Lady says that she listens to her constituents, who know in detail what is occurring in the health service in Cheshire. Unless her constituency is wildly out of line with what is happening in the rest of
Mrs. Dunwoody:
If the Secretary of State relies heavily on opinion polls, he will know how popular the Government are and how the average person is not persuaded about the correctness of their health policies. The people are firmly convinced that the Government have got it wrong, and I agree with them.
The local health authority produced a very glossy document entitled "Continuing Health Care for people with longer-term illness or disability in Cheshire". Using the same terminology as the Government, it states:
That is the real choice. Owing to the enormous pressure on funds, Cheshire will constantly have to address a gap between what it is expected to provide and what it can provide. If there is any pressure within the NHS people will be told, "We are terribly sorry, but although you might have liked to have gone to a particular place, you will be discharged when it suits us." The Cheshire Disabilities Federation has been discussing the problems with the social services department. Its representatives are so worried that they have asked to come and see the Minister.
The Cheshire Disabilities Federation was told that a number of changes were being considered to deal with the overspend. They included a reduced assessment in response times. That is simple. It means blocking more NHS beds. A reduced work force was also proposed. That means letting people go and not replacing them. Cheshire social services also proposed slower responses to hospital discharge requests, the development of more restrictive eligibility criteria, the closure of some local authority residential provision for older people and some day care provision and to combine the rest of the changes across client groups.
Those proposals sound fairly straightforward, but they hide the fact that in future fewer elderly people will be able to get day care assessment, fewer elderly people will be able to leave the NHS at the speed they require or obtain the level of care at the place that they wish, and fewer staff will be provided where they are most desperately needed. I do not regard that as a suitable way of planning health care in my county or an adequate response to the needs of an elderly population.
In my constituency, because of the high incidence of industrial diseases, many people require a higher level of care than those with larger incomes and a different level of life enhancement, but there is now greater pressure on the services that they desperately need. There is probably a higher proportion of people suffering from industrial deafness, there are certainly more people suffering from asbestosis and there are people desperately needing care because they are alone, such as single mothers on
desperately low incomes trying to cope in difficult circumstances. The effect of that is apparent throughout the population.
I had hoped that the Secretary of State would come here this morning, not to deliver an hour's party polemic, but to make a serious attempt to identify the difficulties in the health service and the problems that the Government have created with fragmentation and to attempt to find a way of putting it back together.
No one need doubt that the excrescences of management are so great that they are not only costing clinical care a great deal of money, but they are becoming painfully obvious. My national health service trust pays some employees £80,000 a year--and they are not chief executives. It is not an improvement in management; it is that there are more managers.
Nor has there been better planning in my local national health trust. Some time ago, a decision was made to go off into the private sector and build an incinerator to dispose of clinical waste. A great deal of effort and money was put into planning that pseudo-commercial development. We were told that the incinerator would be enormously effective and would attract industry. People would be happy to use the facilities and all the extra money would be poured into the NHS to provide better clinical care. That plan then disappeared off the face of God's earth because there have been changes in the circumstances which apparently were not allowed for in the original market testing that we had been hearing about at great length. Suddenly the whole plan was dropped with no discussion about what it cost the NHS or people in the area, or what the decision meant in terms of patient care.
I have seen the deterioration of care within the NHS in my lifetime and in my constituency. I have watched staff being told to reapply for their own jobs, argue for their particular little corners and deal with circumstances that mean that people have been forced seriously to consider private provision. I have watched the Government encourage private health care, not only in terms of financial and fiscal benefits but in every other way. It is a deliberate plan to run down the health service in a deleterious and dangerous way.
"Where a patient has been assessed as outlined above as needing care in a nursing home or residential care home . . . they have the right, under the directions of choice . . . to choose, within the policies of the county council and within the limits of cost and assessed needs, which home they wish to move to. Where, however"--
there is a nice little sentence tucked on the end--
"a place in the particular home chosen by the patient is not currently available and is unlikely to be available within three weeks . . . that person should be discharged to another home until a place becomes available."
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