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8.22 pm

Mr. John Heppell (Nottingham, East): The hon. Member for High Peak (Mr. Hendry) says that there is no cause for complacency, but I have sat here and listened as every Conservative Member has been complacent. I have listened to a lot of speeches in the House: some have been boring and some have been controversial, but I congratulate the hon. Member for Wycombe (Sir R. Whitney) on managing to combine the two qualities in one speech.

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman was trying to mislead the House, but he did try to rewrite history when he gave us a lesson about how the Tory party set up the

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NHS and has been one of its backers since 1918. If I may badly misquote Nye Bevan, one does not need a crystal ball to see what the Tories thought of the NHS--one has only to read Hansard, which shows that the Tories not only opposed the establishment of the NHS in principle, but opposed every clause, every line, every dot of the enabling Bill. I do not need any more history lessons from the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. David Willetts (Havant): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Heppell: No, the hon. Gentleman has only just walked into the Chamber.

I do not agree literally with some of my constituents who feel that Parliament is often a pantomime, but we had a good performance from the pantomime dame tonight. All that we have heard about from Conservative Members has been good news. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Forman) gave the game away when he started to say, "Here is the good news." He then cited a great list of operations now being carried out, including those on cataracts. It would be good news indeed if anyone in my constituency had had any such an operation, but not 1,000, not 100 or even 10 people have managed to have any of those operations carried out.

The hon. Gentleman's contribution made me think back to our previous debate on the health service, on 20 November, when my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) revealed that the Tory party had launched a campaign to try to get people together who had good things to say about the NHS because it was worried about the bad stories coming out. It became clear today that all Tory Members have signed up to the good news club. We get no bad news at all from the Tories--only good news: there is no crisis, no problem and nothing to worry about.

It is a shame that that feeling is not shared by my constituents, nor by the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts nor by the members of those trusts. That is clear from the letter of 9 January, which was sent to all members of trusts and health authorities and states:

"Dear Council Member


Emergency Admissions


NAHAT is receiving many messages of concern from trusts and health authorities about the growing pressure being experienced by the NHS through rising emergency admissions. This has been exacerbated by the current bad weather and restrictions in the provision of personal social services during the Christmas period."

The trusts and the organisation that represents them and also the health authorities recognise that there is a problem, but the Minister and his hon. Friends still do not seem to recognise that.

The crisis in my area did not start at Christmas, as it seems to have done for many others. In the debate on 20 November, I recounted how the chairman of Nottingham health authority had said that the authority faced a deficit of £11 million and that it would be a disaster if it did not manage to overcome it.

Mr. Malone: I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman is now discussing finance, as I assume that his thesis is that his health authority has received insufficient funding. In fact, it was increased by 2.36 per cent. in real terms

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this year. Is he saying that any reduction in that on an annual basis during the lifetime of the next Parliament would be unacceptable to him, because that is exactly what those on the Opposition Front Bench are proposing?

Mr. Heppell: I do not agree with the Minister that that is what my right hon. and hon. Friends are proposing. The Minister should know that Nottingham health authority has been traditionally underfunded. According to the Government's own formula, it should receive more than 100 per cent. in funding because of its teaching hospitals, but it has never been funded at that level. The Government recognised that and gave it an extra £5 million; according to the Government's formula, it is being funded at 97.6 per cent.--which is still not equivalent to 100 per cent, but at least it is an improvement.

I am worried, however, because the Under-Secretary of State for Health--the hon. Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam)--has acknowledged that the extra allocation is for next year and that this year the authority already faces a £7 million deficit. The problem for me is that nothing has been done to help the authority this year. On 20 November, I stated that Queen's medical centre at Nottingham had had to cancel 350 non-emergency operations for October, November and December because of that funding crisis. Because of the exceptional circumstances at Christmas and the new year, even more operations have now had to be cancelled.

I recognise that there were exceptional circumstances this winter, but I do not completely accept that argument. The Queen's medical centre said that there was a 50 per cent. increase on normal levels for Friday evenings and Saturdays. It should not compare the Friday and Saturday over Christmas with a normal weekend; it should compare those days with Fridays, Saturdays and Christmases in the past, and with days when there has been bad weather. Many of the circumstances are predictable: winter, Christmas and the new year are not exceptional--we know about them. I do not pretend to be a great fan of Michael Fish, but when he forecasts sub-zero temperatures, I do not need Mystic Meg to tell me that if there is ice, some people will slip on it and hurt themselves, and that if they hurt themselves badly they will end up in hospital, which will mean that more hospital beds will be needed. It all seems fairly simple to me. I am sure that people should be better able to plan for that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Gunnell) talked about past problems when people have been left on trolleys for hours. At one stage over Christmas and the new year, the Queen's medical centre in Nottingham ran out of trolleys. It was not just a case of people not having beds: they could not even get trolleys. I took the problem up with the chief nurse, who assured me that it was not a problem as it was only the accident and emergency department that had run out of trolleys and that staff had managed to get spare trolleys from elsewhere in the hospital.

I did not know that there were spare trolleys lying about, and it makes me wonder why the same argument is not used about beds: why cannot all the spare beds that are left lying around in hospitals be used? That never seems to happen. The reason is that there are not so many beds as there used to be. In my own region--the Trent area--there were 11,085 acute beds in 1989-90;

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by 1995-96, the figure was down to 10,333. Overall, the total number of beds lost in that short period was 5,197. I accept the arguments for some beds going and I recognise that the different ways in which patients are now treated mean that not so many hospital beds are needed, but if some of those beds had been saved, the problems experienced at Queen's medical centre might not have occurred. Some 3,193 of those beds were general or acute beds; they were not beds that were no longer needed because of care in the community.

I am not so concerned about what happened on those nights when the emergency services almost reached breaking point. I am more concerned that not only were 350 operations cancelled in October, November and December, but there is now a hold on all operations. Although there have been plenty of examples in the local press since Christmas--headlines include

"Ops fall victim to QMC rush"

and

"Ops put on ice at QMC"--

the public have still not been told the complete truth. On 30 December the medical director instructed that only urgent surgical cases and people who had spent more than 18 months on the waiting list would be taken in for treatment, the latter being done to help the Government figures for waiting lengths of more than 18 months, not for medical reasons.

On 6 January that policy was changed again. It was said that the only patients to be admitted for operations were emergency and life-threatening cases. None of the operations and new procedures that the Government say are great and can be done on the NHS is being carried out on my constituents. They were denied operations in October, November and December and they are now to be denied them in January, February and March. For six months of the year, all that my constituents can get is emergency provision. When will that become a crisis? Will it be when they can get only emergency provision for nine, 10 or 11 months of the year? The Government must accept that there is a crisis now.

The problem may seem slight to the Minister. The press release lists conditions such as hernias, which people think are not that special. I will describe some of my constituency cases involving people waiting for treatment. One woman is waiting for a hysterectomy. She was expecting to have the operation on 29 November; now she is not likely to get it until the new financial year. Men may not think that that operation is important, but I bet that there are not many women who take that view.

Another case involves an elderly lady with an arthritic spine; she, too, will have to wait until the new financial year before she can have an operation. Someone with a swollen bladder was taken into the operating theatre and then taken out again; he was sent home two days later and told to ring to find out when a bed would be available for him. By the time he did so, the ban had been imposed and he was told, "Sorry--no operations until the next financial year." If I had a swollen bladder, I would not think that it was trivial. Someone whose knee is in danger of packing in and who has already had two operations on it has now been told, "We'll have to wait until it gets worse: when it goes completely, we'll fit you up with a new knee rather than doing the surgery now."

Those problems are serious. Ministers may say that such operations are merely routine, but they are important for those waiting for them. If Ministers had to rely on the

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health service as most of my constituents do, rather than having private health insurance, they would ensure that such problems were put right tomorrow.

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