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6.33 pm
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey): I congratulate the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), whom I know well, on his maiden speech. I welcome him to the House. I also welcome his contribution to the city of Norwich which, as he said, is one of the great cities of England. I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman will be a redoubtable Member of Parliament for his constituents. He used to be the boss of the Cambridge Students Union, well before new Labour. If, when he was CSU president and I was president of my college union, I had predicted that he would be elected to Parliament on a wave of new Labour policies, he would have shown me the door. Even student politics have changed greatly since the 1970s. [Interruption.] Public-private capital in the health service is just another example of this change.
Not all hon. Members may know that the hon. Member for Norwich, South also did a good job at the right hand of Neil Kinnock when he was leader of the Labour party, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for that--I know that he was hugely important to the success of all that Neil Kinnock sought to do.
I was serious when I said that I appreciate the commitment and passion of the speech by the hon. Member for Preston (Audrey Wise) on the health service. I am sure that she will be firm and true to her commitment to keep the pressure on what is now her Government to ensure that the health service has the resources that it needs. Of course the Government need to look at the
books, but nobody who works in the health service believes that it has enough money. I am sure that the hon. Lady knows that, and I look to her and to people like her to tell the truth about next month's Budget and the funding of the health service. I am sure that many of her voters also look to her to do that.
The hon. Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) is no longer in his place, but I pay tribute to him--the youngest Member of the House. When I was elected, I was the youngest Opposition Member at 31. He has come to the House at the age of 24 and relieves my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) of a responsibility that he has carried for more than 10 years. That shows how middle-aged we have become. Unless the House continues to become more representative in age, as well as in gender and colour, we shall not be recognised as properly representative at all.
How we become politically representative is another debate. Suffice it to say that the present Government no more have the support of the majority of the British public than did the previous Government: we are all minorities here and I hope that we shall all have the humility to remember that.
I also wish to compliment the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Mrs. Stuart). I welcome her to the House because, among other reasons, she is greatly committed to electoral reform and to positive progress in Europe. Her constituency has much to commend it--not least the fact that my parents, so they told me, met in Edgbaston at the end of the war and I have studied there and stayed with relatives. I welcome the hon. Lady and all the new Members, especially the women; I sincerely hope that one day at least half the Members of Parliament will be women, as befits a nation more than half of whose citizens are women.
We have a new ministerial team and I welcome them. I wish them well, without qualification. They have a huge responsibility. I should have liked to be in their place because I do not do this job to be in opposition, but I am encouraged by the fact that I now have many more hon. Friends around me and we have made significant progress. The teams with responsibility for health, social security and education have a particular responsibility: they have to build a new welfare state for the next century. That will not be easy and we shall have a great debate about how to fund it. I hope that there will be no no-go areas for that debate. We must open all the doors and consider all the ideas. I welcome the appointment of the Minister for Welfare Reform, the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), because he is a thinker and a brave contributor to that debate. I welcome in particular my two parliamentary colleagues, the right hon. Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Ms Jowell), to their important jobs. The borough of Southwark is well represented on the health and social services agenda on the non-Tory Benches and I am sure that that is what the people of Southwark want.
Whatever the politicians said--including the three party leaders--I believe that the public felt that health was the most important issue in the election. The party leaders claimed that education came first, but the public chose health. That was the evidence of the opinion polls, nationally, regionally and locally. In London and in my constituency--now called Southwark, North and Bermondsey--health was undoubtedly the main issue.
It is therefore a privilege for me to return to Parliament to do the job of health spokesman for my party again, and it is a great privilege now also to have the unsolicited but extremely welcome addition of three colleagues to help me--my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch), who is sitting on the Bench in front of me, and my hon. Friends the Members for Isle of Wight (Dr. Brand) and for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris). I know from my experience in the general election campaign that health was a huge issue in each of those seats, too.
I welcome in addition my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Dr. Tonge), who is sitting behind me and is one of our three new Liberal Democrat doctor Members. I know that in her constituency, as in almost every other, health was a hugely important issue. Only yesterday, services at Queen Mary's, Roehampton--a hospital serving her constituents--were said to be at risk again.
None of us will be under more political pressure than when health service reductions are threatened in our constituencies, because the health service is the most valued public service in the United Kingdom: 95 per cent. of our citizens use it and we must do our best to preserve it.
Let me now sound one note of dissent. I am one of the few Members who was elected by beating Labour. I have done it five times now, so I hope that the Labour party has got the message.
Mr. Dorrell:
I beat Labour, too.
Mr. Hughes:
The right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) says that he beat Labour, too. I also beat the Tories, and I beat them down to 6 per cent. They got 10 per cent. of the vote at the last election, and I did not think that I would get them much lower, but I got them down to 6 per cent. this time, so the possibility of squeezing the Tory vote has now really been reduced in my constituency. To his credit, however, the Tory candidate in my constituency managed to elevate his position from being the candidate with the lowest share of the Tory vote in England to the lowest but one--there was an even lower Tory vote in a Liverpool constituency--so he will obviously be promoted to a better seat next time.
I shall start with a local issue, and then deal with some of the wider issues in the Queen's Speech. The big issue in my constituency in this election was unquestionably the future of Guy's hospital. When I was in the United States for a week last year studying health service matters, people in famous hospitals on the east coast could not believe that the British Government could contemplate running down a hospital like Guy's. They found that inconceivable. During the election campaign, one of the promises made by the Labour candidate in my constituency was that on the first day of a Labour Government Guy's hospital would be saved. A few days passed after the election before the Hampstead and Highgate Express published a conversation with the new Secretary of State confirming that a review of London health services would take place. The test will come over the first year.
For Londoners, and for my constituents, the first real test of whether the Government do their job properly on health will be whether the Minister of State sets about his review with no preconditions or prior agenda, conducts the review using up-to-date facts and statistics--unlike the review under Tomlinson, which was out of date, partial and ignored some of the evidence--and delivers a set of proposals for the future of the health service in London which have been the subject and reflect the results of wide consultation. [Interruption.] The former Secretary of State intervenes from a sedentary position, as he always used to do. I will give way, of course, in a moment.
The intervening period is hugely important. Labour said that in London there would be no rundown or closures of services for the period of the review. That should apply across the country, as we said. We committed the funding for it, unlike Labour. That undertaking must now be carried out. For me and for my constituents, that means the trauma service at Guy's not disappearing before the end of the review and entire departments not being shifted to another hospital. The review must freeze the present position and examine fairly all the services, including casualty, at hospitals such as Guy's.
Mr. Dorrell:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He said that he wanted an open-ended review with no preconceptions and a proper analysis of the evidence. We already know that we shall not get any of that. The Secretary of State has already announced that he is ruling out a possible conclusion of the review when he said that the Government will not end up endorsing the previous Government's policies. That is one conclusion that he has ruled out before the review begins. He has also made it clear that the review has seven months to proceed and complete a process which, when it was initiated by Tomlinson, took three years and engaged a huge consultation exercise leading to the decisions that were announced in April 1995. We already know that the review will take place in a much shorter time scale than last time, and that one possible conclusion--I do not comment on whether it would be the right or the wrong conclusion--has been ruled out by the Secretary of State.
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