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6.17 pm

Sir Raymond Whitney (Wycombe): I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) said, especially with his plea for a more sensible debate about how to go on developing and improving the national health service--a debate that will be possible only by removing the political animus from the subject. Unfortunately, the Labour party is incapable of that.

We have heard two depressing examples this afternoon; and at Prime Minister's Question Time there were two more examples of it from the Leader of the Opposition. He made the same tired old claim that "we"--the Labour party--created and built the national health service. To make such a claim shows either total disingenuousness--I must be careful of my language in this Chamber--or total ignorance. I shall do the right hon. Gentleman a favour by suggesting that his claim is based on ignorance. That is not true of the whole party--some Labour Members know perfectly well who created the health service.

I shall take a moment or two to remind those who may conveniently have forgotten that the first step in the creation of the national health service, which took some 40 years--we may lament why it took so long--was taken

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by a Liberal, Lloyd George, in 1911. It originated with the National Insurance Act 1911. That legislation created sickness benefit, which became known as the medical benefit scheme, and was the kernel of what became the national health service.

Who opposed that measure at the time? It was the British Medical Association. We should remind ourselves of that fact each time we hear from the current Jeremiah of the BMA--over the past year or two it has been Dr. Marks. But there has always been a Dr. Marks at the BMA, opposing virtually every change for the better in the national health service.

In 1918, before the end of the war, the Liberal and Conservative coalition Government launched the Department of Health. It therefore had nothing to do with the Labour party, but was created by the other two parties. I offer that little history lesson because we do not want to hear yet again the nonsense that the Labour party created the national health service.

In the 1920s, Neville Chamberlain, who subsequently became the leader of the Conservative party and the Prime Minister, called for a national hospital service to fuse voluntary and public hospitals, many of which were of an extremely high standard. It could not make much progress because of the economic conditions between the wars, but, in 1938, all those national hospitals were brought together in the emergency medical service. Who did that? It was not the Labour party but the Conservative Government, so that was a Conservative creation.

In 1944, a White Paper laid the basis of what we now know as the national health service. The wartime coalition Government, in which the Labour party participated, had a Conservative Health Minister, Henry Willink, who introduced that White Paper. So let us hear no more nonsense about the health service being the Labour party's creation--[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Nottingham, East (Mr. Heppell) would like to intervene on this history lesson, I am happy to give him that opportunity.

Mr. John Heppell (Nottingham, East): The hon. Gentleman's account is a little misleading. It would be better if he told us how the Conservatives voted when the national health service was proposed. If he is telling the truth, he will have to say that they voted against the NHS at every stage in this Chamber.

Sir Raymond Whitney: I am happy to come to that. The hon. Gentleman slightly pre-empted me.

Everyone greeted the creation of the White Paper except, again, the BMA and the British Medical Journal. The 1944 White Paper was strongly endorsed at the Labour party conference of that year in Blackpool. I now come to the point raised by the hon. Member for Nottingham, East. No one was arguing against a comprehensive health service, free at the point of delivery. That was not the debate, and if the hon. Gentleman thinks that it was, he is dead wrong. The debate was whether to have a centralised organisation that would become overly bureaucratic or a regionally based organisation. The then Herbert Morrison, who may be familiar to some Labour Members, was very much in favour of the local concept. At the very last minute, Bevan

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persuaded the Labour Government to go for the centralised version--the one opposed by the Conservative party--and, when Morrison told Bevan that it would become a bureaucratic nightmare, Bevan said, "No, we can find ways round it." Sadly, it has taken us many years--we are not yet out of the wood--to find a way to resolve the problems of a centralised health service. We all know that.

Let me continue with the "Labour party's national health service". Who first introduced prescription charges? There are no prizes for the answer--it was the Labour party. Who, in the 1970s, cut hospital building by 28 per cent. in real terms over four years? It was the Labour party. Who cut nurses' pay in real terms? It was the Labour party. For three years out of four, the pay rises granted to nurses during the period of Labour government were below the rise in the cost of living.

In 1977-78, there was a real cut in spending of 2.7 per cent. That is the Labour party's reputation and record, and Labour Members and the country should never forget it.

Mr. Hendry: Will my hon. Friend confirm that the Labour party's approach of seeking to cut the health service goes back a little further? The first financial crisis in the health service was in 1949--a year after it was started--when the then Labour Cabinet said that, as the health service had been in operation for a year, the population should be healthier, so the money going into the health service could be cut.

Sir Raymond Whitney: My hon. Friend is right. However, in the 10th anniversary debate of the founding of the national health service in 1958, when happily there was a Conservative Administration, the Conservative Minister for Health, Derek Walker-Smith, said that, if we spent just a little more, the nation would get healthier, and we could then spend less. With the wisdom of hindsight, it now seems incredible that our distinguished and intelligent predecessors should ever have thought that.

We now know the reality, which is what we must all wrestle with. As the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey rightly said, if only we could wrestle with it in a calm and intelligent way instead of with the party clap-trap that we hear all the time about it being the Labour party's national health service, we might make some progress.

We all know the factors: the rise in demand; an aging population; improvements in, but increasing costs of, medical techniques; and the rising aspirations, quite rightly, of our people. All those factors add up to a huge challenge, to which we are rising and have risen during the period of Conservative government, and of which we should be extremely proud.

Just imagine if, in 1979, we had gone to the electorate and said, "Over the next 18 years, we shall increase real-terms spending on the health service year on year by 3 per cent." Who would have believed us? What would the Labour party of the day have said? However, that is what we have done. Had we said that to the BMA, it would have said that all the problems would be solved. Every year, BMA spokesmen say, "Just a little bit more--2 per cent., £2 billion or £10 billion more--and we shall all be OK." Had we offered them a 3 per cent. annual increase in real terms for 18 years, they would have said, "This is utopia; this is heaven." Everyone would have been happy.

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We did not say that, but that is what we have achieved. We now have more than 20,000 more doctors, who are paid 33 per cent. more in real terms. We have 55,000 more nurses, who are paid nearly 70 per cent. more in real terms. That is a great record, and we are proud of it.

It is not a matter just of employing more doctors and nurses and paying them more, however, but of treating more patients with better, more advanced treatment, and that is what is being achieved. Our constituents know that, although they are still fooled by the Jennifer's ear war which the Labour party persists in waging. Labour Members have learnt nothing since 1992 in that regard. We get the same old tired vacuity.

If I speak to my constituents, they say that they hear about the terrible problems in the NHS. When I ask them about their personal experience, they say, "My general practitioner is fine." There are GPs of a high standard in my constituency, I am happy to say, and many of them are in budget-holding practices, with all the benefits that that brings. My constituents tell me about Aunty Mabel, who was in Wycombe general hospital a few weeks ago, where the treatment was wonderful. That is what we all hear, time and again.

Despite all the challenges and the Labour party hypocrisy, we have a great national health service, which is getting better. That is partly a tribute to the healthy economy that we have created, which has enabled us to put in substantial resources, but it is an even greater tribute to the contribution made by all those who work in the NHS, who are daily denigrated by the Labour party. It is time for that to stop.

6.30 pm

Mr. John Gunnell (Morley and Leeds, South): A week ago, I was one of those who raised on a point of order the failure of the NHS to meet the extra demand generated by the extremely cold weather over the Christmas and new year period.

That failure was highlighted for me by the death of a constituent of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Mudie). In dire emergency, that constituent had to travel to Hull for treatment, despite the fact that she lived within one mile of a major hospital and within two miles of each of the major hospitals in Leeds. We have become used to Leeds hospitals receiving emergency cases from as far away as Kent, so people in Leeds were surprised to find that our hospitals could not deal with an emergency on their doorstep.

I raised the point because I thought that the number of incidents and the severity of the shortage of treatment would bring the Secretary of State to the House. Surprisingly, it did not even get him to the studio on the day that the House resumed its business.

That anecdote and others that we have heard during the debate demonstrate a widespread failing in the health service, but it is important to look beyond anecdotes, because, with so many people being treated by the health service, we cannot expect every case to work out satisfactorily. There will always be anecdotes about people who did not receive the treatment that they felt they should have had.

We should accept that the reforms introduced into the health service are not all working as smoothly as is claimed by those who introduced them. The public

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demand changes in our approach to the health service, and I am sure that, after the general election, we will respond to those demands.

The BBC "Panorama" programme just over two weeks ago advanced the thesis that the NHS was being kept afloat in an attempt to see the Government through to the election, that health authorities would be about £150 million in debt by the end of this financial year, and that they were being allowed to overspend by a supposedly fiscally responsible Government in order to create the impression of stability. In effect, that debt will prove to be a deferred cut in NHS spending.

"Panorama" also reported that, in the past five years, £500 million could have been spent on patient care by health authorities, but that, because of short-term political concerns, that was stopped by the Government through the health authority chairmen they had nominated. That charge needs answering.

We must discover why there are severe shortages in the health service. The series of anecdotes is not haphazard, but part of a pattern that reveals deficiencies in the service.

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