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Mr. Fabricant: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Dobson: I will if it is necessary.
Mr. Fabricant: It is always necessary. What will the right hon. Gentleman do about councils, including Labour councils, that posses empty council houses?
Mr. Dobson: Get them to fill them. That idea works reasonably well.
Let us take London as an example. I think that there are 26,000 officially homeless families in London. Last year, under the previous benighted Government, not one council house was built. That had nothing to do with local government; it was because the Government prevented councils from doing it. I am convinced that when we keep our promise it will be good for the families concerned and will improve their health.
I shall give one example. When improvements were made to the Holly street housing estate in Hackney, there was a 33 per cent. fall in demand for both general practitioner and hospital services. It is good for the people and it pays off.
Mr. Dorrell:
Can the right hon. Gentleman confirm that Hackney has no capital receipts? His example does not relate to capital receipts at all. Hackney does not have the resources to do what he is talking about.
Mr. Dobson:
My point about Hackney was that it was an example of where improvements to housing had led to an immediate direct fall in the demands that people placed on local health services because their health had improved. The building of new and improved homes all over the country will be of immense benefit. We will make sure that it happens all over the country.
Mr. Dorrell:
The right hon. Gentleman has just made an important commitment. Is he committing the Government to machinery for translating capital receipts from one part of the country to another? If so, what arrangements will be made to compensate authorities that lose their capital receipts? How will the machinery work? The right hon. Gentleman has just made an important announcement. He is Secretary of State now; he cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and commit the Government to machinery when he does not have the vaguest notion of how it will work, especially as it is not in the Department of Health's sphere of responsibility.
Mr. Dobson:
I repeat exactly what I said when I was shadow Secretary of State for the Environment: except in the fantasies of the Tory party, we have never had any proposals to transfer capital receipts from one part of the country to another. [Hon. Members: "You just said it."] I did not say that at all. As the right hon. Member for Charnwood knows, I said that there will be a house-building programme; it will apply in all parts of the country, and in those parts of the country where capital receipts are available it will be financed from the capital receipts. Is that plain, straightforward and simple, or do I need to explain it again? I will explain it again if the right hon. Gentleman wishes.
Our proposal to get 250,000 young people off the dole queues and into work will improve their health. They certainly need it. That Secretary of State is responsible for all sorts of--[Hon. Members: "You are the Secretary of State."] I got the tense wrong. That ex-Secretary of State was responsible for producing all sorts of statistics. He should have looked at the mortality of young men. Although mortality in general has declined this century, the mortality of young men has risen over the past few years. If people are asked why, they associate it, at least partly, with joblessness and the lack of hope that goes with it, as well as with the problems that follow.
That is why it is absolutely right to take money from the privatised utilities and transfer it, to get 250,000 young people back to work. Tory Members bleat on about how difficult it will be for the privatised utilities. Let me remind them of one lot of figures relating to the water industry. Since it was privatised, the water industry has made profits of £10.5 billion. It has distributed dividends of £3.5 billion and, during that time, under the arrangements made by the benighted Government who have just rightly gone out of office, the industry paid not a single penny in mainstream corporation tax. The Government who privatised the water industry gave it huge sums and took no tax from it. The industry is in for a surprise. Actually, it is not in for a surprise because it has known about our windfall tax for the past four years, but it is certainly in for some taxation.
Many people who are in work are so badly paid that they cannot afford decent shelter, clothes, food or heating, so they are more likely to fall ill. Measures in the Queen's Speech and the forthcoming Budget will help them. We shall introduce a national minimum wage to lift working people out of poverty so that they can afford better clothes, food and heating. We shall also reduce the cost of heating by reducing VAT on fuel. The national minimum wage will help to reduce the £4 billion which taxpayers must contribute towards benefits that make up, at least in part, for the low wages paid by the worst employers. Above all, it will mean that many of the worst- off will be ill less often and will die later in life than they would otherwise have done. I should have hoped that the right hon. Member for Charnwood would wish that to happen.
Mr. Dorrell:
The right hon. Gentleman will be preparing his spending bids for the public expenditure survey. I presume that he will include an estimate for the cost to the national health service of the Government's minimum wage commitment. What will that estimate be? How much does the right hon. Gentleman intend to write into the health service budgets for 1998-99 to cover the cost of the minimum wage?
Mr. Dobson:
I must say that I regard that as an abject plea of guilty. The Secretary of State is saying--[Interruption.] The former Secretary of State is saying that after 18 years of presiding over the health service he is proudly proclaiming that a lot of people working in it are on poverty wages. He is the one who has the explaining to do, not me. All the changes--[Hon. Members: "How much will it cost?"] How many people are on poverty pay in the NHS? I am happy to give way to the right hon. Gentleman to hear the answer.
Mr. Dorrell:
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He is the Secretary of State and he has just made a commitment to introduce a minimum wage. Presumably he intends to do that during the course of 1998-99. That will have a cost to taxpayers and I believe that taxpayers are entitled to know how much the right hon. Gentleman's policy will cost them.
Mr. Dobson:
Until the Secretary of State tells me how many people are on--[Interruption.] I will get it right eventually; I understand that the Paymaster General can distinguish between us, and that is quite important to me.
Mr. Dobson:
No, I will not give way. I do not think that wigs are available on the NHS yet.
All those changes will apply wherever poor housing, high unemployment and low wages occur. As we all know, some parts of our towns and cities--and for that matter some rural areas, which are now represented by Labour Members for the first time in a long while--contain dense concentrations of poor housing, low wages and high unemployment. As a result, those areas have generally poor standards of health. We intend to take concerted action to improve those areas. That will involve partnerships between central and local government, business and voluntary organisations designed, first, to stop the rot and then to start to put things right. The NHS will be at the heart of those efforts to treat ill health and promote good health.
Our election manifesto also committed us to make sure that the appointed boards that control health authorities and trusts should become more representative of the communities that they serve. I can tell the House that arrangements have already been made to ensure that that change applies to all future appointments, including the round of posts up for renewal from 1 November.
The new Labour Government intend to tackle the root causes of ill health and inequalities in health. We intend to restore and improve the national health service so that it can provide the best health services to all who need them. We shall therefore do away with the internal market that has proved unfair and wasteful. We shall use pilot schemes to develop alternative means of organising local services which draw on the local knowledge, skills and experience of the staff involved.
Under Labour the NHS will be a public service which belongs to the people of this country and which commands their support. We want to ensure that the NHS deserves the loyalty and commitment of those who provide the services: the people on whom we all depend--the people whom the Labour Government will allow to get on with their jobs.
I should like to finish on a personal note. I hope that I shall never find myself at this Dispatch Box claiming personal credit for any improvements or good performance in the NHS. To the best of my knowledge, no Minister of the Crown has ever treated the sick, comforted the dying or tried to comfort grieving relatives: all of that is done on our behalf and on behalf of the people of this country by almost a million dedicated, hard-working people. Whatever arguments we may have across the Floor of the House, I hope that we can agree that we owe it to them to ensure that they can do the jobs which they have set their lives to do and on which we all depend.
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