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Judy Mallaber (Amber Valley) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman talks about being scared, but will he apologise to NHS patients and staff at Heanor Memorial hospital in my constituency for the Tory billboard poster on cleaner hospitals, which was placed nearby for a day? The recent Peat report showed that the hospital had good cleanliness throughout, a good matron, and good infection control procedures. The Tories were either ignorant of the controversy over press misreporting or they deliberately went ahead with scaremongering, which really upset local staff at the hospital. Will he apologise?

Tim Loughton: On the Peat report, I put it to the hon. Lady that of the 20 worst general acute NHS trusts for MRSA in England—they administer 34 hospitals—18 were rated, under the Peat guidelines, as acceptable for cleanliness; 13 were rated good for cleanliness; and three were rated excellent for cleanliness. Those included some of the hospitals with the worst MRSA rates, so she should reflect further on the definitions of her own Government and try to understand how those hospitals are being assessed. The Government are misleading the patients and the staff. If she thinks that it is a service to patients to conceal information, she is sorely mistaken. We are in favour of revealing any information for the benefit of patients, so that they can make informed choices and decisions. It is outrageous that patients who pay their taxes should not be entitled to receive that information. We will make that change after 5 May.

Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Will he consider the complaint of a constituent of mine, Mr. Bovill, which I have submitted to my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley)? Mr. Bovill's experience in the Royal Berkshire, a highly rated three-star hospital, was very different from what he expected of a hospital that had passed the Government's tests. Could that demonstrate that, as my hon. Friend suggests, the Government do not always measure what matters to the patients? Mr. Bovill reports a very dirty hospital, and the explanation was that it was between cleanings and monitorings. Will my hon. Friend ensure that we allow hospitals the wherewithal to be clean at all times?

Tim Loughton: I applaud the tenacity of Mr. Bovill, who is doing the sort of job that might previously have
 
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been done by community health councils. They used to take up the fears and concerns of local patients about cleanliness in hospitals, but they can no longer do so. The poodles that replaced CHCs do not have the powers to do that job, and so in many cases it is up to individuals such as Mr. Bovill. The same problem has arisen with a hospital in a trust near my home in Sussex.

The truth is that the Government are losing the fight against the superbug. They are losing because they are substituting the quantity of their initiatives for the quality and effectiveness of what they should be doing, as recommended in previous independent studies by their medical advisers and by us. The Government have got the system wrong, and until they change it matters will not start to improve fundamentally.

Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): I accept from my own subjective experience that the culture of cleanliness and disease control is very different now, even in the most dedicated hospitals, from that which existed 20 or 25 years ago when I worked in theatre. I knew what was expected of me and of other staff in the hospital.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned experience abroad. What assessment has he made of the contribution that might be made by bacteriophage therapies to reduce MRSA infection?

Tim Loughton: I have not made a detailed assessment of that, but we should learn from the experiences of successful hospitals on the continent. Indeed, we should have learned from them some years ago, but that has not happened.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): I have the permission of my constituent, Mrs. White, to use her case. She came to my surgery in a very distressed state because her husband had died of a suspected hospital-acquired disease in the Royal United hospital in Bath. She told me that it did not look as if the hospital had been cleaned for weeks, and there were used syringes lying around. The local trust is in severe financial difficulties. Is it not time that the Government got to grips with those problems?

Tim Loughton: I sympathise with my hon. Friend's constituent, Mrs. White, but I am afraid that hers is not an isolated case. We must do more to restore the confidence of patients in our hospitals. We will do the patients, the staff and the whole system a disservice if we do not restore that confidence.

I have some specific questions for the Minister. Why will the Government not conduct a search and destroy approach to tackling MRSA and other hospital-acquired infections, as recommended by their chief medical officer in "Winning Ways" in December 2003? Such an approach has been dramatically successful in Holland and Denmark and could work in the UK. In the Netherlands, they screen patients and isolate those infected, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Mrs. Robinson) mentioned earlier. Who exactly has the final say over infection control in hospitals? How can the Minister justify a situation, revealed by the National Audit Office report in July 2004, in which 12 per cent. of infection control teams reported that a recommendation
 
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to close a ward or hospital to admissions for the purposes of outbreak control was ignored? When will the Government give proper control of infection outbreaks to matrons or other appropriate health professionals, rather than to management ones to carry out the Government's obsession with targets? Where exactly does the buck stop in hospitals? Who is really in charge? Does the Minister not understand—as again the NAO suggested—that because of the pressure to meet Labour's targets, hospitals have poor infection control?

"The increased throughput of patients to meet performance targets has resulted in considerable pressure towards higher bed occupancy, which is not always consistent with good infection controls and bed-management practices."

That is a quote from the NAO.

Mr. Richard Spring (West Suffolk) (Con): The obsessive intrusion by central Government—the creation of targets that lead to clinical distortions—lies at the heart of the problem. I visited my local hospital and had a meeting with the chairman and chief executive. While that meeting was going on, there were 110 patients with a diarrhoea and vomiting bug. I was not told. The culture of fear that now obtains in many parts of the NHS is such that transparency has ceased because of the way that the Government seek to control, with targets and interference, the real function of the NHS.

Tim Loughton: That is the absolutely fundamental point of our criticism of the way that the Government have handled this crisis.

David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Tim Loughton: I want to make progress, but I shall return to the hon. Gentleman in a moment because this will not be a long debate and many hon. Members will seek to contribute in interventions.

If hygiene is to improve, it is vital that hospitals are given real freedoms—to introduce initiatives, improve facilities and balance competing priorities, such as waiting lists and safe bed occupancy levels, without risking the wrath of Whitehall. As Dr. Alison Holmes, the director of infection, prevention and control at Hammersmith hospital has acknowledged,

"the juggling act of quick turnarounds and bed hogging required to perform more procedures on more patients with shorter stays in hospital is fuelling the spread of infectious disease."

David Taylor: The hon. Gentleman seems to be guilty of trying to make a general case from anecdotal evidence. Does he agree with the comment in a newspaper with which, I am sure, he will be very familiar—the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald—where the writer said that it is easy to cut and paste to give the impression that an institution is generally bad and filthy when it is not? The writer was the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison), who is sitting two places from him on the Front Bench.

Tim Loughton: The hon. Gentleman's comments are rather complacent. Most of the points that I have been
 
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making are from experts involved in the NAO report, which was based not just anecdotal evidence, but on a pretty comprehensive study.

Mr. Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich, West) (Lab/Co-op): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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