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Mr. Luff: The hon. Gentleman leads me into a whole new speech that I would dearly like to make, destroying the analysis that he has just offered the House. In essence, the current Chancellor has faced relatively benign economic situations nationally by comparison with those faced by previous Chancellors. I know that the hon. Gentleman was not in the House at the time, but if he would care to remember some of the circumstances that the last Conservative Government faced, including the consequences of German reunification in particular, he would paint a very different picture. As for fiddling statistics, this
Chancellor's treatment of issues such as PFI debt for the tube, and tax credits, which count as negative income tax, is fiddling statistics on a spectacular scale.
Mr. Luff: I shall happily give way a second time.
Paul Farrelly: If we indeed inherited a golden inheritance, to use the hon. Gentleman's own words, has he ever thought that after 1993, things simply could not have got any worse?
Mr. Luff: That is the voice of a man who believes his own propaganda—something that I try very hard not to do. I shall happily take the hon. Gentleman to the bar after this debate, sit down and show him the economic series. The fact is that everything started getting better from 1993. Every economic series that one looks at shows that plain, simple and straightforward fact. It would do the House a great service if all Labour Members—I do not blame the hon. Gentleman in particular, as he is following a lead given him by people such as his Prime Minister and Chancellor—looked at the facts and saw what actually happened. If he did so, he would see just how wrong he was in his assertion and its implications.
Before that intervention, I was discussing public sector employment and productivity. The previous speaker, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), gave us a fine analysis of productivity in the health sector, and again, the available statistics, which come from the Office for National Statistics publication on economic trends from July last year, only go up to 2001. Intriguingly, they show roughly no change in public sector productivity in 1996; a 1 per cent. improvement in 1997; and—those were years of austerity in public expenditure—another 1 per cent. improvement in 1998. As we get into the years in which the Chancellor increased spending, however, productivity fell by 2 per cent. in 1999; by 1 per cent. in 2000; and by 2 per cent. in 2001. It should surprise no one that if money is thrown at a system faster than the system can absorb it, the system will not spend it wisely.
The Chancellor's Budget strategy raises some important questions. He is spending to the hilt and hoping to get away with it, and that is having some strange consequences at a local level in my constituency. I shall highlight the example of education spending—I unreservedly welcome the increased capital expenditure on schools in my constituency. On Friday last week, I opened a new classroom—the increased capital expenditure is clearly having a beneficial effect and I do not pretend that it is not.
Revenue expenditure is sadly a big issue in Worcestershire, however. By increasing education expenditure in real terms, the Chancellor is bizarrely creating a worse problem for Worcestershire schools, which are falling behind their neighbours because of the rigged funding formula. Straight percentage increases in expenditure on schools means that Worcestershire schools will fall relatively further behind because of the iron law of compound interest. I urge Treasury Ministers to talk to their ministerial colleagues in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and say, "If we are
putting extra money into schools, we must ensure that it is spent fairly across the country; otherwise anomalies between local education authorities will grow, with very serious consequences for the children in the local education authorities left behind."The Red Book—I do not know why it is called that because it is a white book—is the Chancellor's personal manifesto. Governments used to publish about one third of its contents; the other two thirds is public relations, spin and puff. The Chancellor talks glowingly about jobcentres on page 84 and about the role of primary care trusts in helping to address local need on page 150. I repeat my plea, which I have already made twice in this Chamber and intend to make again tomorrow at Health questions, for the Government to examine the consequences of not giving true independence to primary care trusts but running them from the centre, through strategic health authorities, while claiming that they are locally organised.
That lack of independence has destroyed eight important health projects in south Worcestershire. One such project at Droitwich Spa in my constituency was intended to include a major new Jobcentre Plus, a police facility, a county council facility, a district council facility, a voluntary facility and a new health centre. Arbitrary changes to funding rules mean that we will not get that investment and that the whole project is at risk, which is completely contrary to the Red Book.
We often hear Labour Members discussing our plans for Home Office expenditure, but I am not too impressed by the Government's plans for Home Office expenditure. Some 300 additional police officers are coming on stream this year in the West Mercia constabulary area, which is welcome. However, who has paid for them? Not the Home Secretary or the taxpayer nationally, but the council tax payer, through phenomenal increases in the police precept. The trouble is that those phenomenal increases are building huge resentment not against the Government—as they should do—but against the police. They lead people to ask, "Why am I not getting the police service I expect for the money that I am being forced to pay?" I urge Ministers to examine that question seriously. There have been 33 per cent. and 15 per cent. increases year on year, and the overall increase in the West Mercia constabulary's precept since the Government came to power is nine times the rate of inflation, which is simply unsustainable and creates problems for the management of the police.
In a final footnote to my speech, I am disappointed to see the Chancellor's disclosure on page 116 of the Red Book that he wants to give orphan assets, which are unclaimed assets in banks, building societies and—now we learn—life assurance companies, to charity. The victims of failed occupational pension schemes should have first claim on those assets, which would address a real and urgent need caused by a problem that was not of people's own making and which the Government are morally obliged to do something about. The obvious way to do it is through the unclaimed assets, but the Government are turning their back on that route. That is distressing.
I trust the people of this country to spend their money better than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I look forward to taking that battle to the people in an imminent general election.
8.50 pm
Mr. David Wilshire (Spelthorne) (Con): May I start, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by apologising to the House? When I originally put in to speak, I thought that I could be present throughout the debate, but my duties as an Opposition Whip made life difficult, as I explained to Mr. Speaker earlier. I am sorry not to have heard all the speeches.
Every time I hear the Chancellor or the Secretary of State for Health, I am reminded how desperately out of touch with reality they are. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) said, they have come to believe their own propaganda. If everything is so wonderful in the NHS, why do my constituents face £17 million-worth of cuts year on year at the Government's insistence? If the NHS is safe in the hands of this Labour Government, why are they trying to privatise part of my local hospital? While Ministers stand at the Dispatch Box and spin away about an NHS utopia, my constituents know different—they know the truth.
I want to tell the House about the reality of the NHS in my part of Middlesex. My local general hospital, Ashford, started as a workhouse. In 1987, when I became the local MP, it was mainly a collection of wartime temporary prefabs. During the time of the last Conservative Government, it was completely rebuilt. Since 1997, it has suffered cut after cut. In 2000, this Government axed its accident and emergency department, scrapped all its intensive care beds, and stopped in-patient paediatric services. Now, they are at it again. This year, they want to scrap the emergency department, which they gave us when they axed the A and E; scrap all the high-dependency beds, as well as the intensive care beds; and close all 150 medical and acute surgical beds. If they have their way, Ashford hospital will have fewer beds than when it was a workhouse, and my constituents will be left with a first-aid post by day and a telephone to ring for a GP deputising service at night. The reality of the NHS in Spelthorne is not what the Chancellor's spin claims it to be. Small wonder that a former A and E consultant at Ashford said of the cuts that the Government have been making, "People will suffer and some will die."
That is the reality of what this Government are doing to the NHS in my constituency. The way in which they treat the NHS in Surrey is a downright disgrace. It is underfunded so that money can go to Labour cronies, inadequate allowances are made for the additional costs of providing services in the south-east, and the longevity of my constituents is completely ignored when it comes to working out the demands on services. Listening to the Chancellor last week, one would have thought that the Government would do something to help; but not a bit of it. Their response to the problems in my constituency is to demand more and more cuts.
If I look back, I can see that the rot set in when the Ashford trust was merged with the St. Peter's trust. That was an attempt to save money by shifting services out of Ashford and into St. Peter's. The result was predictable:
St. Peter's could not cope. In due course, a damning National Institute for Clinical Excellence report into its maternity services produced another crisis.All that led to something else: no stars when the Government produced their first little league table. The Government brought that on themselves. What did they do? They sacked the chairman and the chief executive and had the bright idea of franchising the management of the trust. The purpose of the franchising exercise was made clear—"Sort out the mess that we, the Government, have made of the services and end the overspending." The Government received and accepted a proposal, but to this day, they refuse to publish the franchise plan. They will not tell us what they agreed and what was meant to happen. I have asked time and again only to be answered with a refusal to publish.
That probably does not matter now because another financial crisis has overtaken the trust and the franchise plan to which I referred is irrelevant. The current crisis is even worse. The Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals NHS trust is now breaking the law because it overspends by £17 million a year. On top of that, it has an inherited debt. I note that the Government wrote off the debts of some trusts in some places but because the trust is based in Surrey, which they do not like, I guess that our debt will not be written off.
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