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Mr. Bayley: The hon. Gentleman is wrong to say that the Labour party will not match the Government's spending pledges on the NHS--[Interruption.]--the Labour party has done so. I read with great care his article in The Guardian of 9 January in which he set out the Liberal Democrats' health policy, and it included a number of specific spending pledges, which I asked the statisticians in the House of Commons Library to cost. They tell me that their best estimate is that in 1998-99 the package of measures proposed by the Liberal Democrats would cost an additional £650 million and roughly an additional £1 billion in the following year--it depends on the level of NHS inflation. Given that the Liberal

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Democrats have already committed 1p in the pound on income tax to education and given that his 5p on cigarettes will raise only £175 million--

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Hon. Members are aware of my views on interventions--they should be short. The hon. Gentleman should seek to catch my eye and make his points in a speech of his own.

Mr. Hughes: The hon. Gentleman did not quite finish, but I shall say that we have made a commitment. I shall be happy to talk to him outside the Chamber and go through the figures, but our commitment is clear. First, we have made a commitment to keep pace with NHS inflation throughout the life of the next Parliament. The Government have made a commitment only to keep pace with ordinary inflation and the Labour party has a commitment to fund only one year--the first year--at the rate of the increase in ordinary inflation. Secondly, we have committed an additional £550 million a year, which, as the hon. Gentleman rightly said, will be raised from 5p on cigarettes, which will raise £200 million to restore free dental and eye checks, and from tax collection from employers through national insurance, which will raise £350 million.

If NHS inflation starts to rise again, instead of decreasing, we will have to address the question of where the money will come from. However, there is absolutely no doubt--we have checked our figures with the Commons Library, too--that an analysis of the present commitments on the table of the three main parties in the House shows that the Liberal Democrats have committed far more resources than the other parties; the Tories are clearly second and the Labour party clearly third in the league table.

Mr. Forman: Does that mean that the oft-quoted remark of the leader of the Liberal Democrats that his party would simply put 1p on the standard rate of income tax to fund its education commitment is not the Liberals' only public expenditure commitment and that the Liberals are also committed to other forms of tax increase?

Mr. Hughes: I do not want to be distracted from my speech, but we shall commit an extra £2 billion for education and if that has to come from an increase in income tax--1p in the pound raises about £2 billion--we shall do that. It depends on how much is in the kitty, how many people are in work, what is the social security budget and other factors, but we shall do it. We are committed to further tax increases in respect of the health service: first, imposing additional duty on cigarettes and, secondly, closing various employers national insurance loopholes. Those are tax increases for specific groups in society--they are not general. Those two specific additional commitments have been agreed by all Liberal Democrat Members and by my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce), who speaks for us on Treasury matters, and they are supported by my colleagues in Wales and Scotland who recognise the benefits.

I shall now return to my speech and the five points in the motion. Secondly, I pay tribute to the fact that the NHS works because its staff operate extremely well. Throughout the country, they are under great pressure at

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this time of year and they are doing an extremely good job. I was in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford a couple of weeks ago and staff there are coping, although they have had to delay admissions and put off operations so that patients have had to stay in waiting lists. The staff are doing all that they can to manage. This morning, I was at the South Westminster health centre, which is just round the corner in Vincent square and is run by the Riverside Community Health Care NHS trust. It is an excellent health centre and is clearly doing a good job. With one of my colleagues, I went to a large GP surgery in Elephant and Castle, the Princess street group practice, which is doing an excellent job. Queenie Harrild--a constituent of the hon. Member for Lewisham, East (Mrs. Prentice)--died in Guy's hospital a week ago and that tragic case was mentioned by the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury. Her family specifically said that they were critical not of the staff at the hospital, but of the system and the lack of beds.

Thirdly, it is true to say, as Labour says in its motion, that the result of current policy is that

"government policy has left many people in urban and rural communities without the access to health care they need".

In urban areas, that may be a lack of an intensive care bed when and where one is needed. In rural communities, it may be a lack of a dentist anywhere near one's residence or a lack of a community pharmacist. In all cases, there is a risk that an individual might find himself or herself discharged too early. The hon. Member for Bristol, East (Ms Corston) mentioned the outrage felt in Bristol at people being woken up and sent home from hospital in the middle of the night. Of course, that is what happens to less urgent cases, but that should not be the way in which a publicly funded national health service is run.

Mr. Hendry: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Hughes: No, I am conscious that other hon. Members want to speak.

Fourthly, we share the Labour party's view that we need a more democratically accountable NHS. There should be regional health authorities in England, and democratic authorities in Scotland and Wales, to decide on strategic policy. They should decide whether hospitals are needed or not, instead of that being arbitrarily decided by the Secretary of State. At a local level, trusts and health authorities should be more democratic.

Fifthly, we believe that we must restore confidence in the NHS.

We could have tabled no amendment to the motion, or we could have just congratulated the NHS on its successes and paid tribute to the progress that it has made. Certainly, there has been progress both in paediatric intensive care and in intensive care generally. By convention only the Government amendment is selected on such occasions, but I am glad that the two ideas in our amendment were not completely dismissed either by the Secretary of State during questions today or by the shadow health spokesman when I intervened earlier.

First, the public want the NHS to be removed from the party political battleground. I recently appeared on a Granada television programme with spokesmen from the other two main parties, and someone in the audience made precisely that point. Facts, for instance, could be removed from the battleground. We may disagree about funding,

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but the facts should be agreed--for instance, about how many intensive care beds there are and how many hospitals have closed.

Today the King's Fund issued a report on mental health. It is a well-respected independent body; perhaps we could agree to let it do this statistical work. Before the end of this Parliament, I would hope that the three major Great Britain parties, the Irish parties and the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties will agree to allow an independent, respected and recognised body to provide us with the evidence on which to base political decisions.

Earlier today the Secretary of State referred to the report by the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts, the last paragraph of which reads:

"Undoubtedly, despite the problems, the service generally has been maintained, although some elective treatments are being deferred. But however hard the NHS is working, the initiatives taken do not solve the underlying problems of capacity and demand. It can be expected that comprehensive reviews of current clinical and workload practices will be undertaken by health authorities and trusts. But overriding this is the need for a high-level review of both the current position and the implications for the future provision of services."

That is why we need agreement on the size of supply and demand, whereupon the politicians can sort out, and put to the public, the best way of dealing with the problems.

Of course some more funding will be needed. We calculate that if people's lives are not to be put at risk by the closure of beds, wards or hospitals in any part of the country, the finance-driven closure programmes and any consequent reductions of services must be put on hold. Doing that will cost about £350 million a year--perhaps we could achieve all-party agreement about that.

I hope that the other political parties will respond to my twin proposals, to obtain independent information and to provide the money that will stop the running down of services. It is no good Conservative Members claiming that the Tomlinson report or the other reports commissioned by the Government are independent and objective. The Government ordered the reports; their authors reported back to the Government. The Nolan commission is more along the lines of what I have in mind--enjoying the confidence of all Members of the House.

Tomorrow we will debate intensive care, so I do not intend to go into it now--except to comment on the fact that the Secretary of State only partly answered the questions about it. Of course the demand for intensive care will change, but we need to hear from Ministers on the record whether they think that we have enough paediatric intensive care beds and other intensive care beds to meet current needs. I hope that such a statement will be made tomorrow morning in the debate; anything less would be a fudge.

One effect of the pressures on the health service is that many operations are deferred. People sometimes die as a result. The lady I mentioned earlier died of a heart attack which, according to the consultants, she would not have had if a bed in Guy's hospital could have been found for her to use after her heart bypass. Theatre and staff were available, but there was no intensive care bed. Thus someone with more years to live lost her life.

Part of the solution must be to separate elective beds for non-emergency admissions from emergency beds, so as to avoid the problem of those with booked beds being put off while they serve as emergency beds.

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Many of us are grateful for the universal recognition today that mental health services have been the Cinderella services of the NHS. Those who lose out most are the people with conditions that are not quite acute but are nevertheless immense. I am told wherever I go that only those who present with the most severe mental illnesses are treated, and that people whose needs are slightly less urgent but still serious do not get the service they require. Hence the need to go on building up these services. A mental illness is an illness like any other; those who suffer from mental illness deserve the NHS just as much. Yet they are often treated as lesser beings. Mental illness can come to any one of us. That is why we should ensure that those who suffer from it are given as much chance to recover as people with physical illnesses.

Another problem arises because health authorities and trusts are eating into next year's budgets to pay for this year's, and this year they ate into last year's. I do not know whether the Government can raid the coffers before the general election; I do know that there is always a contingency fund and that, as the election draws nearer, it is eyed ever more keenly. I hope that the Secretary of State and Ministers at the Department will be able to persuade the Chancellor that as little as £200 million, if released this year, would remove some of the pressures and prevent the perpetual delays in treatment that afflict the service.

When the election comes, it will not be about whether we should have a national health service--all the parties are signed up and committed to one. The debates will be about whether to fund it properly. I therefore end where I began. The job of politicians is to be honest with the public. The NHS will be the brilliant jewel of our welfare state only if we inject it with the necessary amount of public money. That is what will divide the parties at the election. My colleagues and I believe that if we fund health and education properly, we shall have a society that is both well and well equipped. Only that will make us the sort of successful nation that our people want us to be.

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