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7.34 pm
Mr. Ray Whitney (Wycombe): What the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell) says about the health service in the north-east bears no relation to my experience in the health service in Buckinghamshire and in many other parts of the country. For example, he referred to nurses' pay declining. That is contrary to the facts. If my memory serves me well, since 1979 nurses' pay has increased in real terms by 45 per cent. Nurses' pay dropped only once in real terms and that was during the time of the Labour Government.
The hon. Gentleman seems to have trouble with the service he gets from his trust. He does not like fundholding. He suggests that nurses are leaving the health service in droves. The South Buckinghamshire NHS trust gives excellent service to my constituents. GP fundholders give excellent service too.
The hon. Gentleman seems to get no proper answers when investigating complaints about his chief executives. Again, that is contrary to my experience and, I suspect, to that of most hon. Members.
Mr. Ronnie Campbell:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Whitney:
Very briefly. The hon. Gentleman had a pretty good innings.
Mr. Campbell:
I did not say that I did not get proper answers; I said that the health service ombudsman said that he did not get proper notice from health executives.
Mr. Whitney:
I can repeat only that that is certainly not my experience and I would be surprised if colleagues had a similar experience.
What the hon. Gentleman produced was on a par with that produced by his hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman). As someone who has been interested in the health service for many years, I have grown accustomed, over the years, to hearing a litany of complaints and--as the cliche has it--to seeing this shroud waving. We have had that this afternoon, particularly from the hon. Member for Peckham, who always--she, too, has been involved in the health service for a number of years--comes to the House and reads out her essay, which is one long dismal dirge quoting individual cases.
Invariably, Conservative Members become deeply angry about that misrepresentation of the health service and about the total farrago of misinformation. It is based sometimes on ignorance and sometimes, one is moved to believe, on malice. The standard attacks are normal. Sadly, part of the reason for that is that the national health service has become a political football--a lamentable feature of British politics. I may not have agreed with many of the things that the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), the Liberal Democrat spokesman, said, but I join him in this: if only the Labour party grew up and stopped believing in the myths that it has created about what did or did not happen in 1948, we could have a genuinely adult approach to tackling the challenges of health care.
Everyone knows what those challenges are. With the discovery of new treatments, the aging of the population and the wonderful opportunities that are available, added to the inevitable and inescapable pressures of funding, there are and will always be challenges, but we shall get nowhere as a nation while we have the pettifogging, narrow-minded and idiotic approach that was personified by the performance of the hon. Member for Peckham.It is a matter of great regret that her participation in the debate and her presence in the Chamber seemed to be of such brief duration. We have seen little of her. She would have at least learnt something if she had stayed.
Mr. Alan Milburn (Darlington):
What about the Secretary of State for Health?
Mr. Whitney:
My right hon. Friend was here a great deal longer than the hon. Member for Peckham. She is in much greater need of learning what is happening in the health service than is the Secretary of State.
The approach of the hon. Member for Peckham seemed to be based on one or two minimal propositions. The first was the usual litany of individual cases--we heard the same from every other Labour Member who has contributed--in which the NHS may or may not have failed. As up to 1 million patients a day are treated by the NHS in hospitals or GP surgeries, it is not surprising that there can be one or many more mistakes. Of course, that is not the story of what is really happening in the NHS. The lie is given to those statements by Labour Members--or would be if they thought, for only a moment--by the situation into which they plunged what they are so fond of calling their national health service.
In relation to other issues, such as what happened in 1979 and before, I am almost prepared to let bygones be bygones--but not about the NHS. The Labour Government's record was criminal, and Labour Members should never forget it or be allowed to forget it. They speak as if they are completely ignorant, which is the most
charitable thing that I can say. They do not know how bad it was when they ran it. They seem to have no idea of the fact that we have increased spending on the NHS in real terms by 66 per cent.
The average spend has increased from £433 to £697 a head, which is a terrific achievement. Of course, any fool can spend money badly; the great challenge is to spend money sensibly. That is what is happening. It has not been universally successful, because that is not in the nature of life, or certainly not in an enterprise as big as the NHS. We heard no recognition of that fact from the hon. Member for Peckham.
We heard from the hon. Lady that fatuous attack on management. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) said, Conservative Members, far more than Labour Members, would lead the charge on bureaucracy. When one is dealing with£41 billion of taxpayers' money and when there are more than 8 million hospital treatments every year, one needs that money and that enterprise to be managed. To spend 3 per cent. on management charges strikes me as entirely reasonable.
The one concrete point--if it can be so dignified--made by the hon. Member for Peckham was that, in relation to resources, she had allegedly discovered£1.5 billion that was spent on management that she would transfer to front-line care. How will she manage that? What will she do? If 3 per cent. for management charges is too much, is 1.5 or 2 per cent. the right figure? We never hear anything like that from the Labour party, and least of all from the hon. Lady.
There was some suggestion that the NHS was being privatised, which of course is complete nonsense. It is true that we do not share the hon. Lady's opposition to private medical care. We believe in choice. I shall not go over the issue of choice, which has been so familiar over the past few days in relation to the hon. Member for Peckham, but it should be recognised that the private medicine sector is not in competition with, but is an adjunct and addition to, the health resources of the nation. I hope that the Labour party is clear about that.
The Member for Peckham seemed to object strongly to any increase--she greatly exaggerated what it has been--in private medical provision. I must tell Opposition Members that the final years of the previous Labour Government were one of the bonanza times for the private medical industry. They were the great recruiting sergeants for private medicine because the health service was in such a mess. The hon. Member for Blyth Valley would have had something to complain about then. That was when people, including the unions, flocked to sign up by the cartload for private medicine. Union leaders were working hard, and why not, to provide private medical services to their members in case it was needed.
We heard that great litany, which completely disregarded the achievements of the NHS which include the fact that 3 million more people receive treatments every year in NHS hospitals, and we have thousands more doctors and tens of thousands more nurses. It was the same old litany that we have heard so often.
I believe that a great disservice is constantly done to the 1 million people, or whatever it may be, who are now working in the health service and giving a first-class,
international-quality service. The litany has completely devalued and debased that service. I hope that the Labour leadership will look at itself and try to adopt a more positive attitude and constructive approach. Perhaps then we will be able to conjure up some meaning out of the term "stakeholding". That would be better than a diatribe, of which the hon. Lady gave us the most classic example.
The hon. Lady said, for example, that some treatments were no longer available. Does she not know that there are vastly more treatments available now than were dreamt of in 1979, not because of the Conservative Government but because of medical advances? The Government have generated an economy that is successful and strong enough to bear the necessary increase in resources that are devoted to the NHS to bring those new treatments to the service of our constituents. The hon. Lady's statement that treatments are no longer available is a grotesque misrepresentation of reality.
The hon. Member for Peckham, finally, tried to attack the private finance initiative, and again she seemed to be at odds with her leader and protector, the Leader of the Opposition. In the Budget debate he said:
"The PFI is right in principle. We have supported it, and in many ways we have been advocating it."--[Official Report, 28 November 1995; Vol. 267, c. 1077.]
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