argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Clive Anthony Lewis (Labour, Centre-left): With the climate crisis and the reality of an ageing population, there has never been a better time for the Government to centre the wellbeing of people and planet and the way in which public services and the economy are run. Sadly but unsurprisingly, the Bill fails in this context, so I will vote against it, because it does not fundamentally deal with the very real issues facing our healthcare system. It does not address the desert of NHS England providing oral and dental healthcare, which has made it impossible for my constituents to get an appointment. It does not guarantee fair pay and conditions for the key workers who have seen us through the pandemic, and it does not deal with the scandalous state of mental health- care. Patients in my constituency are in crisis, are discharged too early, or not admitted at all, while for a decade, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust has failed to end the practice of sending patients out of area What the Bill does do is transfer yet more centralised power to the Executive—rightly described as a power grab by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth)—and, of course, to the private sector. Clause 13, which provides for the establishment of integrated care boards, opens the door to private companies having a say in where funding is allocated and what services are delivered. Clause 3 gives greater political control to the Secretary of State over the NHS England mandate without creating a duty to provide universal, comprehensive and free healthcare to all. Clause 38 empowers the Secretary of State to intervene in the reconfiguration of services, opening the door for politicised interference and gridlocks on decision making Where is the democracy, accountability and transparency in the Bill? How will the right of my constituents to healthcare be guaranteed over and above the interests of private companies and the political whims of the Secretary of State? To see what happens when private companies have any role in delivering care, we need only look at the social care crisis. In England, 84% of care home beds are managed by private companies, and three of the five largest care home companies are owned by investment firms whose main priority is economic rent seeking, not the long-term care of our elderly. That model has, unbelievably, led to a cut in the number of care home beds, despite an ageing population, meaning that demand is only growing I therefore urge the House to vote against this legislation on what remains of NHS England. It extends the same failed ideology that puts profit before people and which has driven our planet and public services to breakdown.
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Olivia Frances Blake Dagnall (Labour, Centre-left): I previously had a role within the NHS, and I have family members who work in the NHS, of whom I am very proud. Nine years ago the Conservative party passed the Lansley reforms, and for nine years the NHS has suffered the consequences of that disaster. We have seen creeping privatisation, fragmentation of services and a lack of adequate funding. For patients that has meant disjointed care and soaring waiting lists, made worse by covid. For healthcare professionals, it has meant the NHS is no longer a hospitable place to work Before the pandemic, the national health service had a vacancy rate of 8%, which is 100,000 vacancies. I know from discussions with a variety of professional bodies and unions that there are significant skill shortages that will only get worse. Last year, a survey by the BMA found that 45% of doctors across the UK experience depression, anxiety, stress, burnout and other mental health conditions. How is it right that our NHS professionals are so over-represented among those experiencing mental health problems The Royal College of Nursing has found that 36% of nurses are thinking of leaving the profession, and YouGov reports that a quarter of NHS workers are more likely to quit their job than they were a year ago, due to low pay and understaffing. While Ministers have clapped for carers on their doorsteps, many of my constituents who have worked in the NHS rightly say that they do not want platitudes. They want to be heard. They want a proper pay rise and an end to top-down reforms that do nothing to address the real needs and their real concerns For them, this Bill is more of the same, but it is also an indictment of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. It is the Government admitting that they have failed. Rather than learning the lessons, they have doubled down on the failures. There is nothing on waiting lists, nothing on vacancies and, despite the Prime Minister’s promise of a plan for social care, nothing on fixing the system that the pandemic has shown is not fit for purpose Rather than reinstating the duty on the Secretary of State to provide a comprehensive health service, reversing the privatisation of the NHS or reinstating the NHS as the default provider, the Bill allows private providers to sit on the boards that decide how NHS money is spent. It is astounding, but not surprising. After nine years of failure and after a year of handing millions of pounds to Tory cronies for useless PPE and a failed privatised test, trace and track system, the Government are now proposing to increase the influence of private companies in the health service. Unfortunately, on all these issues the Bill has nothing good to say, and even worse, it says all the wrong things.
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Kevan David Jones (Labour, Centre-left): In opening this debate, the Secretary of State said that the Bill would improve patient safety. One area in which it does not do that is the area of cosmetic surgery. In April 2013, the Government commissioned Sir Bruce Keogh to do a review of this industry following the PIP—Poly Implant Prothèse—implants scandal. He came forward with some very sensible and clear recommendations to improve safety in the cosmetic surgery industry and to make sure that patients were protected. The review highlighted the fact that those buying a ballpoint pen have more protection than people having non-surgical procedures in this sector. These recommendations have sat on the shelf in the Department of Health since then. I have asked numerous times when they are going to be implemented, only to be told tomorrow, but tomorrow never seems to come We did see some change with the private Member’s Bill of the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott)—the Botulinum Toxin and Cosmetic Fillers (Children) Act 2021 —which, for example, limited botox for under-18s, but this business is a wild west when it comes to regulation. There is a missed opportunity in this Bill not only to get proper patient safety, but to implement Sir Bruce Keogh’s recommendations, which the Government say they support but somehow do not want to implement. This is a multibillion-pound industry, and patients are being put at risk. It is mainly women who, in this sector, need protection. I hope that the Government will implement the Keogh recommendations in this Bill, and I put the Minister on warning now that I will be tabling amendments for that. This is important, and I do not yet understand the reason why the Government are not doing it, because the royal colleges support this and a large number of Members of Parliament have backed these reforms. They do need to be implemented, and we are missing an opportunity to do so May I touch on one last thing about public health? I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) that public health, strangely enough, has been forgotten about in this crisis. If we had actually concentrated on putting the main focus on public health and supporting directors, I think we would have had a better outcome. This is not just about this Bill forgetting about public health; it is about the money that goes with it. Under the fair funding formula being touted last year, County Durham would have lost £19 million in public health funding, while Surrey would actually have increased its budget by £14 million a year. That cannot be right. Public health now needs to be at the centre of our healthcare locally, and the Government have to ensure not just that it gets a voice in this Bill, but that local directors of public health get the finance and support they desperately need.
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
William Roffen Esterson (Labour, Centre-left): During the pandemic, NHS staff, care workers and public health teams have all gone the extra mile, as they always do, in protecting and caring for people. Health professionals have been ably assisted by a number of former colleagues who had retired and by an army of volunteers, and I thank them all In government, Labour increased NHS funding by more than 9% a year. Let us compare that with the just 2.5% from the Conservatives before the pandemic, or the £8 billion cut from council social care budgets since 2010. In the Liverpool city region, 50,000 patients are waiting to start routine treatment at Aintree University Hospital alone, of whom a third have waited more than 18 months. Meanwhile, many people find it difficult to get an appointment at their local GP surgery. New facilities, including a new health centre in Maghull in my constituency, would help there Alongside dealing with the immediate challenges of the pandemic, Labour’s priorities involve addressing the problems caused by those Conservative cuts which predate the crisis: waiting lists, staff recruitment, social care funding, and yes, the need to give our staff a pay rise. After all, who will look after patients if we do not value our staff? Sadly, the Conservatives have rather different priorities. The pandemic has seen companies without a track record—companies that happened to know the right people—making their fortunes. As the National Audit Office confirmed, companies without political contacts had only a 1% chance of succeeding, while £10 million was handed out in contracts without competition. Then there is Serco Test and Trace: delays in returning test results, dependence on £1,000-a-day consultants, and unused call centre capacity All that waste and inefficiency prompts us to ask why Ministers were so committed to outsourcing. The Bill offers some answers. Private companies on new health boards and the centralisation of power point to a potential consolidation of the cronyism and privatisation that have characterised the Conservatives’ approach to the covid crisis. Every day that frontline NHS staff are forced to spend on top-down reorganisation is a day less to tackle waiting lists, address the challenges in social care, and cope with covid. Meanwhile, the reorganisation will take money away from local services, where it is most needed. A prime example is the cut of £253 per patient from Knowsley as a result of the Bill. One of the poorest boroughs in the country will face poorer health outcomes That is the reality of this Bill. How can it possibly be right?
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Zarah Sultana (Labour, Centre-left): When a Labour Government proposed a national health service after the second world war, promising free universal healthcare for all, it was a radical idea opposed by the Conservative party, which complained—I quote from an amendment tabled at the time—that it "discourages voluntary…association…and undermines the freedom and independence of the medical profession" The Conservatives did not like it that the NHS was centralised, public and free for all. They condemned it as Marxist and voted against it 22 times. Fundamentally, they opposed the NHS for taking healthcare out of the market and for putting public good before private profit, but they saw its popularity and begrudgingly were forced to accept it Those fundamentals have not changed. This NHS corporate takeover Bill is another step away from the original truly public healthcare system, free from the corrosive influence of profit. The Conservative party still opposes that idea. Conservatives should not just take my word for it; they should take the words of their own Members. The Prime Minister, when he was a Back Bencher, slammed the NHS as "monolithic" and "monopolistic", and called for privatisation. Four senior Cabinet members, when they were Back Benchers, wrote a manifesto in which they argued that two thirds of hospitals should be run outside of the NHS, and run privately or not for profit. We also have a new Health Secretary, who in the last year, alongside his role as a Back Bencher, has been on the books of US megabank JP Morgan. He has been making £150,000 a year from a company that—I quote from its literature— "see the opportunities that lie ahead" for private healthcare. The Health Secretary’s ideological hero, Ayn Rand—whose work he says he rereads every year—was an extreme right-wing libertarian philosopher, who detested socialised healthcare It is not just words; it is deeds too. The Government are breaking up the NHS, not all in one go, because they know that the public would not like that, but piece by piece. Privatisation by stealth—that is what they have been doing. Since coming into power in 2010, more than £96 billion has gone to non-public healthcare providers and nearly 20% of healthcare bids now go to private providers. This Bill will not reverse that. It will simply entrench it. It will put private companies on healthcare boards, giving them a say over our care and public funds. It will add steroids to the cronyism on steroids that we have seen in this pandemic, whereby Tory mates and donors have been handed billions of pounds in dodgy covid Government contracts. It will implement a healthcare model that incentivises cuts and closures, and rations funding to health boards This dangerous Bill is another step towards privatisation. In its place, we need to reinstate the NHS as a truly public service with a proper pay rise for its workers of 15%, making up for a decade of falling pay.
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Jon Hedley Trickett (Labour, Centre-left): The Government’s health strategy is clear: while health demand rises, the amount of resources being provided to the NHS is declining, which leaves well-heeled patients with nowhere else to go to avoid ill health except into the so-called independent sector. For example, a constituent told me that his opticians had said that he could wait six years for cataract operations, by which time he would be nearly blind, or he could pay for a cataract operation now in the private sector Even before covid, the Government had cut the health budget and spending. In Britain we were spending £2,000 per head of population less than was being spent in Germany. There were cuts to the numbers of staff and to their pay, 100,000 vacancies, 17,000 fewer hospital beds and over 100 fewer A&E facilities, with hospital waiting lists therefore doubling—even before covid arose—since the end of a Labour Government. The Bill continues all that process, as we would expect. It will make the NHS more remote because it is top-down, and it is a Trojan horse for elements of privatisation Newly remote administrators will have little sensitivity to local health requirements. Members should think of the differences in the health needs of former coalfield communities such as those I represent in West Yorkshire, the inner city of Bradford and the relative affluence of Harrogate, yet all that is to be covered by a single new board, and the centralisation of clinical services makes them less accessible. Some 20,000 people are living in my constituency with no car to their households’ name and with poor public transport, many of them with chronic health needs. How on earth will they be expected to travel to centralised services in Leeds or elsewhere under those circumstances There are two competing views of health provision facing each other. Either health is about an ethos of care or it is about making money. This Bill leads in one direction. The Government do not want to fund the NHS properly, so they are trying to entice more private money into health, often from sources, we note, from the Tory party. Privatisation puts one person’s wealth in front of another person’s health. We should look at the pages of the American health service providers today salivating at the prospect of growing NHS waiting lists, and now, so-called independent providers are to be invited to sit on boards that actually manage the NHS budgets. The idea of profiteering from someone else’s ill health is repulsive to most British people, yet it is intrinsic to this Bill. We can call it only one thing: parasitic capitalism. Along with the Royal College of Nursing, the British Medical Association and many other practitioners, we must resist the creeping destruction of our NHS.
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Deborah Angela Elspeth Marie Abrahams (Labour, Centre-left): This is the wrong Bill at the wrong time. To introduce a Bill like this when the covid pandemic is far from over and staff are on their knees shows a lack of understanding of what is needed I am concerned that this reorganisation of the NHS is being used as an opportunity to extend the involvement of UK and international private healthcare companies. The Bill proposes that private healthcare companies can become members of the integrated care boards, potentially meaning they will be able to procure health services from their own companies. Under the Bill, ICBs will have only a "core responsibility" for a "group of people", in accordance with enrolment rules made by NHS England. There are concerns that this evokes the US definition of a health maintenance organisation, which provides "basic and supplemental health services to its members" What is included in the core responsibilities Why is there no longer a duty but only a power for ICBs to provide hospital services? What does that mean for the thousands waiting for elective surgery? What about those waiting for cancer and other therapies? For those who say, "What does it matter who provides our healthcare as long as it meets the NHS principles of being universal, comprehensive and free at the point of need?" I say that not only is the Bill a clear risk to those founding NHS principles but there is strong evidence that equity in access to healthcare, equity in health outcomes and healthcare quality are all compromised in health systems that are either privatised or marketised, as the NHS has increasingly become That brings me to my third area of concern: health inequalities. It is notable that the Bill places the duties for the reduction of health inequalities with ICBs. The 2012 duty on the Secretary of State and NHS England to reduce inequalities is repealed, showing the clear lack of commitment to levelling up and the reduction of the structural inequalities that have been laid bare by this pandemic and contributed to the UK’s high and unequal covid death toll. With this change, the Secretary of State is ignoring not only decades of overwhelming evidence that clearly shows that health inequalities are driven at national policy level, but the Prime Minister’s commitment to implement the recommendations that Professor Sir Michael Marmot made in his covid review last December to tackle inequalities and build back fairer My final point is on social care. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dementia, I express my profound disappointment that, 19 months since the Prime Minister pledged to fix the broken care system, it still has not been fixed. The Bill is a missed opportunity to set out the framework for social care reform in the context of an integrated health and social care system. For people with dementia and their family carers, who have suffered disproportionately from covid, this is a real blow. They deserve better. For me, the principle of health and social care—
Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-14
Topic: Health
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): This Health and Care Bill has been conceived in bunkers behind screens within echo chambers. It is straight from the US health market, and its architects are immune to objection from the frontline leaders who are expected to deliver a new health and care system. In case the Government had not observed it, those people are in the midst of managing a pandemic, its resurgence and its aftermath. They are holding together a fragile workforce, traumatised by the pressure and sacrifice of the covid war. They are vaccinating a nation while seeing others fall to preventable diseases. They are embracing those with broken minds as they try desperately to hold on to their own It is no time to strip out the NHS’s infrastructure and replace it—eager as we are to do so—with something as ill-defined, void of detail and illiterate as the Bill presents. The Bill will shift the blame for an imploding NHS and shattered care system from the impervious Prime Minister to NHS workers. The backlogs will be their fault. They will be to blame for service cuts, and the Government will shrug their shoulders at the postcode lottery and rationing. We have more than 5 million people waiting for hospital appointments. We are unable to see a GP for weeks. We are waiting longer than ever at A&E and, when the care system fleeces people for all they have and fails to restore their dignity in their fading years of life, the Bill scapegoats local health and care teams while the Government wash their hands We are in this mess because, in 2012, the Government—and, let us not forget, their Lib Dem chums—messed with our NHS, ignored clinicians and seeded the failures that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic. History repeats itself. The market-driven system enabled Ministers to sign away billions of pounds on crony contracts while frontline staff were wrapped in bin bags—and some, tragically, in body bags. The Bill lets the Government off the hook. When things go wrong, they will simply blame others as they avoid shame. But, worse, private companies are already sitting round the tables of the shadow integrated care systems to profit further. Nothing has changed. If the Bill changes nothing, we do not need it to further destroy the remnants of Labour’s precious NHS. At the one time we need certainty, there is none The Bill fails to provide the vital stability, funding, accountability or transparency that is needed. It fails on prevention and the advances that patients need. It has more private commissioning, not less, no workforce planning or vital staff pay and, crucially, no social care, yet the NHS will integrate with it. Labour believes that people deserve better. We must have integrated health and social care, free to all in need, wholly delivered in our public sector by fairly rewarded staff and accountable to this Parliament and to the people. Now is not the time and this is not the Bill. I will vote against it.