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Mr. Speaker: The hon. Lady has put that matter on the record.

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Health (Patients' Rights)

4.41 pm

Mr. Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale, West): I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the National Health Service to provide a patient with treatment in a private hospital or in a hospital outside the United Kingdom in certain circumstances; and for connected purposes.

The intention behind this Bill is to alleviate the pain and suffering of tens of thousands of patients waiting for treatment in the national health service. The purpose of my Bill is to introduce some patient power into the NHS. Too many people are waiting too long for treatment and, despite the Government's pronouncements, the situation is getting worse, not better. In my health authority area of Salford and Trafford, the latest Department of Health figures show that the percentage of patients waiting more than 12 months for in-patient treatment has more than doubled: 2.9 per cent. of patients waited more than a year in March 1997, but that figure rose to 6.4 per cent. in August 2001—an increase of 121 per cent. The same story is repeated across the country.

The right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), who is the Labour party chairman and the Minister without Portfolio, owned up to the decline last week. He told the BBC that, although there had been improvements in some parts of the NHS,

"in other areas we have even gone backwards".

His honesty made headlines. It was the first time that a Cabinet Minister had publicly acknowledged that some parts of the health service had deteriorated since Labour was voted in on the claim that voters had only

"24 hours to save the NHS".

For patients and their families, of course, this failure is not news. For people waiting month after month for an operation to alleviate a painful or even life-threatening condition, it is a daily reality. This Government have increased NHS funding, just as the previous Government did, but it is no good for the Government simply to throw money at the problem. A new approach must be found. All too often, the Government turn away from radical solutions for improving the NHS, accusing those who propose them of wanting to privatise the service.

The reality is that people are being forced into paying for treatment in the private sector by this Government, because they are told that they will have to wait, in pain, for months before they can be treated. If they thought that six months would mean six months, they might be prepared to wait, but they have no guarantee about that. Six months can run into 12 months, and a cancelled operation may push the treatment even further away.

Patients have nothing that they can depend on, so they turn to the private sector. Some of my constituents have spent their life savings on treatment. For example, Mr. Hickson, a widower from Timperley, could wait no longer for his hip replacement, and spent everything that he had saved for his retirement on private treatment.

Another constituent, Mrs. Mary Kyng, was in severe pain following a fracture and needed a hip replacement. She was told, not that she would be operated on in seven months, but that she faced a seven-month wait before she could have an operation, and that that would be "at the earliest". After enduring pain for several weeks, when she

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could not get up and down her stairs or care for herself properly, she was desperate for treatment, so she took out a loan to cover the cost of a private operation. She has now had her operation but says that she will be paying off her debts out of her state pension until she is 75. When I wrote to the Secretary of State on her behalf, asking whether she could receive some form of compensation from the NHS, I was told that seeking private medical care was "a personal decision". My constituent is paying the price for the Government's failures.

Another constituent wrote to me recently asking whether he could go to Germany for his knee replacement operation. He was told that he would have to wait a minimum of 12 months to have the operation done here, but he has been informed by the hospital in Germany at which his nephew is an orthopaedic surgeon that he could have the operation there as early as this week but would need the NHS to cover the clinical costs.

It should be possible for patients to seek treatment either in the private sector or overseas if the NHS has failed to treat them within a reasonable time. Although the recent ruling in the European Court regarding patients' rights brought that closer to reality, in practice patients are being prevented from seeking treatment elsewhere because they have to wait for health trusts to authorise it. A lucky few on the south coast can benefit from Government pilot schemes, but that does nothing for my constituents or for those of most right hon. and hon. Members up and down the country.

Health trusts will argue that they can provide the treatment but for patients there must be some guarantee. They should be given a time when they know they will be treated, rather than a vain hope.

The Government set great store by targets. They have put pressure on hospitals, health trusts and health authorities to make waiting lists appear shorter, sometimes by distorting clinical priorities. In some cases, patients with life- threatening conditions are denied urgent operations so that those with less serious but more easily treatable illnesses can jump the queue. Hospital managers have been discovered removing patients' names from official waiting lists so that their hospital appears to be meeting Government targets.

We need honesty, transparency and treatment according to clinical priorities, not priorities set in an arbitrary fashion by the Secretary of State. This June, he said:

"The maximum waiting times will fall from 18 months today to 15 months by spring next year, then to 12 months and by 2005 it will be down to 6 months."

At present, however, patients die waiting for cardiac surgery. A consultant at Wythenshawe hospital, Ben Bridgewater, has said that an awful lot of people who die seem to do so within the first six weeks of going on waiting lists. He argues:

"Changing waiting times from 18 to 12 months would be tiptoeing around the edges. It won't make a difference. We need to almost eradicate the waiting lists."

Obviously, something radical has to be done.

My Bill would do two things. First, it would give Ministers the power to fix a maximum waiting time for all treatments. It might be 12 months at first, reducing to

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six months in due course. It would be approved by affirmative resolution in the House. That would achieve transparency and accountability. Crucially, patients would have a right to treatment within the guaranteed time; they could rely on more than just a ministerial aspiration.

Secondly, my Bill would give clinicians the power to specify a maximum safe waiting time for a patient on clinical grounds. If the new maximum waiting time was too long for a particular patient, if the condition would deteriorate through waiting or if there was a real danger that a patient would die on the waiting list, the consultant could recommend a maximum safe time.

I am pleased to have the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) as one of the distinguished sponsors of my Bill. He has given a great deal of thought to the matter and has led the way with his proposal for what he described as "NHS International", whereby British NHS patients could seek treatment overseas. Indeed, hospitals in Europe, reading his original articles on NHS international, believed that the scheme was up and running. Inquiries flooded in from European hospitals asking how soon they could treat NHS patients trapped on long waiting lists. I am sure that I am not the only Member who received inquiries from constituents who saw a ray of hope in the proposed scheme.

The right hon. Gentleman has expressed fears that the private sector may be more expensive than overseas hospitals. I believe that if my proposals were adopted, the result would be an increase in competition to which private sector prices would respond. In any case, at a time when the health budget has been underspent, the cost would appear to be less of a problem than the structural and capacity constraints of the NHS.

Power in the NHS has to shift from the bureaucrats to the patients. Patients must have a right to be treated within a guaranteed time, and that time must be based on clinical, not political, priorities. If the NHS fails to treat a patient within that time limit, it must foot the bill for overseas or private treatment.

The Government have pilot schemes for overseas treatment and allow a limited number of people to receive treatment in private hospitals, but they are not moving quickly enough and they are not going far enough. To relieve the burden on the NHS requires radical solutions now. My Bill could ease the anguish and suffering of tens of thousands of people who are waiting for treatment, and I commend it to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Graham Brady, Mr. Frank Field, Dr. Ian Gibson, Miss Julie Kirkbride, Mrs. Marion Roe, Dr. Richard Taylor, Mr. Nicholas Winterton and Mr. John Burnett.

Health (Patients' Rights)

Mr. Graham Brady accordingly presented a Bill to require the National Health Service to provide a patient with treatment in a private hospital or in a hospital outside the United Kingdom in certain circumstances; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 18 January, and to be printed [Bill 61].

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