NHS Performance: Darzi Investigation

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Lord Darzi’s independent investigation into NHS performance.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to open this debate on Lord Darzi’s investigation into the national health service, not just so that we can debate the past and what went so badly wrong, but so that the House can also debate the future of our NHS, how it needs to change and the many reasons to be optimistic about what our health service can be.

We have to start with honesty. For too long, Conservative Governments swept problems under the carpet, more interested in scapegoats than solutions. [Interruption.] I know; it is terrible. That is why I asked Lord Darzi to conduct an independent investigation into our national health service. He is an eminent cancer surgeon, with 30 years’ experience in the NHS, yet what he found shocked even him: some 100,000 toddlers and babies were left waiting for six hours in A&E last year; more than one in 10 hospital beds are taken up by patients who do not need to be there; children are less healthy today than they were a decade ago; adults are living longer but getting sicker sooner; conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure are rising relentlessly; mortality from preventable causes is far higher than in other advanced countries; almost 3 million people are off work sick; and waiting lists are at record highs while patient satisfaction is at a record low.

The fundamental promise of the NHS—that it will be there for us when we need it—has been broken for a decade. Why? Because of four knock-out blows. First, a decade of under-investment means NHS staff are forced to use pagers and fax machines, with fewer cancer scanners than Greece and buildings literally crumbling. That is not to mention the disgrace that the previous Government’s new hospitals programme was written according to fictitious timetables, with the funding running out this coming March.

Secondly, there was Andrew Lansley’s disastrous 2012 top-down reorganisation that nobody voted for, cost billions and took years. It was an enormous waste of time, talent and money that should have been spent on caring for patients.

Thirdly, there was a failure to reform. The reforms made by the last Labour Government, which delivered the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in history, were ditched—a golden inheritance squandered.

Fourthly, there was coronavirus. Lord Darzi found that the NHS was hit harder than any other comparable healthcare system because of the damage the Tories had already done. It is not just that they did not fix the roof when the sun was shining; they doused the house in petrol, left the gas on and covid just lit the match. That is why millions are stuck on waiting lists, ambulances do not arrive on time and people cannot see their GP. Never forgive, never forget and never let the Tories do it again.

Lord Darzi’s report was utterly damning about the treatment of children in our health system. He said that too many children were being let down, and pointed out that they account for 24% of the population, but only 11% of NHS expenditure, and that over 100,000 children wait for over a year to be assessed for mental health treatment. He said we must do better, so will the Secretary of State commit to putting children front and centre of the 10-year plan, and to making them a priority, because for a decade, the Tories let our children down?

I strongly agree with the hon. Member. I will talk about the 10-year plan shortly, but I can guarantee that children and paediatric care will be front and centre of that plan. We can do much more to shine a spotlight on paediatric waiting lists, as well as doing much more in practice. She mentioned children and young people’s mental health, on which our parties strongly agree. We will deliver our manifesto commitment to put mental health support in every primary and secondary school in the country, as well as providing walk-in services in every community, so that young people receive the mental health and wellbeing support that they need and do not get to the crisis point reached by far too many of our children.

The hon. Member’s intervention is an example of why I am looking forward to the debate. I hope to listen to contributions and to challenge from all sides of the House. Before I take any interventions from Conservative Members, I advise them that if they want to get a hearing on the NHS ever again, then the first word that should pass their lips is, “Sorry”. Only last week, at the Conservative party conference, we did not see a single shred of remorse or contrition for their appalling record. Indeed, when it comes to the shadow Secretary of State and her party, it seems that sorry is the hardest word.

The NHS is broken. NHS staff do not want to accept that, but it is. According to YouGov, that is what the vast majority of patients say. It is also what staff tell me every time I am on the frontline, but I understand why some people find the word difficult. In the past few weeks, I have met some of the NHS team who happened to be on duty on Monday 29 July. I have listened to paramedics describe the scene they walked into at the community centre in Southport. Children and adults who had been dancing to Taylor Swift were lying bleeding and, in some cases, tragically dying as a result of an unimaginable, senseless, mindless attack. Those paramedics had to make split-second decisions about who to treat and in what order to give the injured the best chance of survival. Security teams cleared busy hospital corridors to shield as many people as possible from the horror. Lab teams mobilised blood supplies. Receptionists fielded calls from panic-stricken patients. Surgical teams across multiple hospitals worked together, fighting to save those young lives. Even now, months later, mental health staff are picking up the pieces for families who are either grieving or going through the unimaginable challenge of supporting their children through what they witnessed.

Across my constituency, my constituents are struggling to see the GPs they need; indeed, we see that across the whole nation. On Friday, I visited the Park View surgery, where the GPs do not have the necessary resources and cannot move into the premises that they need to be in to treat their patients. Can the Secretary of State assure me that he will follow Lord Darzi’s recommendations and invest in primary care, so that my constituents get the GPs they need and the Park View surgery can move into the premises that it needs, with the capital expenditure that it requires?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. Of course it is not just in Loughborough that we have a challenge with access to general practice; it is right across the country. I want to be clear, because GPs come in for a lot of criticism: primary care may be broken, and the front door to the NHS may be broken, but GPs did not break it. In fact, there are fewer GPs now than there were in 2015, yet they are providing more appointments. They have worked hard to improve the productivity of general practice, but they are under-resourced. That is why we are committed, as I told the Royal College of GPs just last week, to delivering the shift that we need out of hospitals and into the community—to growing primary care, including general practice, as a proportion of the NHS’s budget, so that we have the GPs needed to treat patients on time.

Saturday was World Meningitis Day, but in the last year we have seen an almost doubling of meningitis cases in the UK. Does the Secretary of State think that the meningitis vaccination take-up rate is where it should be?

I am grateful to the hon. Member for her question. No, I do not think that the take-up rate is where it should be. That is why in the short time we have been in office we have put more effort and energy into vaccine take-up, but there is more to do. I welcome her to the House, and will not have a go at her for the record of the people who sat on the Government Benches just before the general election.

At the end of September, a large GP federation serving patients across Sussex suddenly went bust, causing 130 redundancies; patient care was severely affected. The federation reported that the cause was a failure to obtain long-term contracts from any of its major clients, and the erosion of the real-terms value of contracts with both primary care networks and NHS Sussex. Does the Secretary of State agree that protecting continuity of service is key to public confidence in primary care, and will he meet me to discuss this case?

I am grateful to the hon. Member for her intervention. I wish that this was a challenge only in her constituency; it is a challenge right across the country. As I said to the Royal College of GPs last week, it will take time to rebuild general practice, so that it is back where we want it to be. We would be delighted to hear more from her; I will ensure that my Department makes contact, and that a Minister is in touch about the challenge in her constituency.

I thank the Secretary of State for today’s debate. The whole House, and indeed the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, wishes him well in bringing forward the changes that we wish to see. An issue that comes to my attention regularly is research and development. We hear in the press every day about new advances in treating diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia and rare diseases. When we look at the bigger picture of the NHS, we see the big problems, but sometimes there are smaller issues. Will he reassure us that research and development will be encouraged?

I strongly agree. Although health is devolved, I look forward to working constructively and closely with Governments right across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, because every part of the health system in every part of the UK is going through challenges. We are determined to do that. [Interruption.] I think the hon. Member wants to come in again.

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommendations go from here to Northern Ireland, and then we endorse them; if we do not get them from here to start with, we cannot make people better. That is the point that I was trying to make.

The hon. Member’s point is taken.

The NHS stands at a fork in the road. There is a choice before us, and the parties represented in the House have different opinions on the best way forward. The first option is for the NHS to continue on its current path—to head down the road to ruin, on a mismanaged decline, with a status quo so poor that patients are forced to raid their savings to go private, and with the worst yet to come, because many Opposition Members believe that all patients should have to put their hands in their pockets when they fall ill. Reform UK has openly stated that it wants to change the funding model and replace it with an insurance-based system, and plenty in the Conservative party want to head in the same direction, chasing Reform UK down the hard-right rabbit hole.

That is nonsense.

The shadow Secretary of State says that it is nonsense. She is very upset about it, so let me point out to her that earlier this year, the Conservative former dentistry Minister, who served in her team, under her leadership, proposed a monthly £10 insurance fee to see a dentist. That is what the Conservatives were planning before the election. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member wants to intervene, I will give way.

I will happily intervene. That is simply incorrect. There are a couple of points that the Secretary of State has made that are completely wrong, which I will have to correct in my speech. He is no longer in opposition. He needs to be careful what he says on the record. That is not right.

Honestly, Madam Deputy Speaker, “brass neck” springs to mind. Once again, the hon. Member gets to her feet and fails to say the word “sorry”. If she wants to correct the record, how about she stands up and corrects the abysmal record that she and her predecessors lumbered this country with? They took the NHS from being the very best—that is how it was left in 2010—to being the very worst; that is how she inherited it. If she wants to talk about humility, she might like to start demonstrating some before her time in Parliament comes to an end.

If the hon. Member wants to distance herself from her former dentistry Minister, let us turn to the candidate seeking to lead her party who is head and shoulders above the rest with its membership, the right hon. Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch). She wants to go even further. On whether the NHS should be free at the point of use, she told The Times last month:

“I think we need to have a serious cross-party, national conversation.”

That is what she said about whether the NHS should be free at the point of use. I suspect that she has blamed the journalist for her own words since, but just so that Government Members are clear, that will happen over my dead body. This Labour Government will always defend our NHS as a public service that is free at the point of use, so that whenever someone falls ill, they never have to worry about the bill.

The problem is not, and has never been, the fair, equitable model of funding. It is the same model that we had in 2010, when the last Labour Government delivered the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in history. A universal, single-payer health service is the fairest, most equitable way to provide healthcare. More than that, in a way that could never have been predicted in 1948 by Attlee and Bevan, it makes the NHS the best placed healthcare system in the world for the revolution taking place in genomics, technology and life sciences. The NHS has the right funding model, but it is not taking advantage of the opportunities in front of it. That is what we need to change.