Health and Care Bill — House of Commons, 2022-03-30
Topic: Health
Daisy Cooper (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The Minister made a valiant effort to dissuade some of us from supporting Lords amendment 29—the workforce amendment—but I suspect he knows he is not kidding anybody We have learned today that public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest level since 1997. We should not underestimate the blow that that news will deliver to the health and care workers who turn up, do an amazing job, and go above and beyond every single day. To say that that news is dispiriting is an understatement. It is important that those workers know that the public, and every Member of this House, loves our NHS; it is just that we want it to work a bit better. It is hardly surprising that people’s biggest frustrations are waiting times, a lack of proper funding and staff shortages. Those things are the fault not of health and care workers but of this Tory Government, who are driving our health and care services into the ground Cancer Research UK says that without the workforce amendment the Bill will fail to address the biggest barrier to the achievement of world-class cancer outcomes in the UK: the staffing shortages and pressures. The King’s Fund has said that the health and care workforce crisis will be the key rate-limiting factor in the reduction of the NHS elective care backlog. The workforce amendment may not be a silver bullet, but it is the closest thing to one, which makes it all the more frustrating that the Government will not accept it. As I suspect the Minister knows, the Government’s objections just do not stand up to scrutiny As the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) said, framework 15 simply sets out the number of staff the Government think they can afford, rather than the number of staff we actually need. I urge the Minister to think about what message that sends to my constituent, who is a newly qualified midwife. She wrote to me just a couple of months ago and said: "I am extremely concerned about the crisis in maternity care. This isn’t caused by Covid-19—the systemic failings have been crippling the service for a generation—but the pandemic has made a bad situation worse." She said: "I am being harmed, my clients are being harmed. Staff are being harmed. For every 30 newly qualified midwives, 29 are leaving. Parents are reporting bullying and coercion. Threats are being used to ensure compliance. Unnecessary medical interventions are at epidemic levels. Trauma—amongst parents and midwives—is rife." She said that "concerns are being missed" and interventions "made too late", and that the reason was "staffing problems." If that is not a wake-up call, I do not know what is I wish briefly to express my concern about the powers the Bill will give the Secretary of State. At best, the change will create a bureaucratic nightmare; at worst, it will lead to meddling and the politicisation of the day-to-day running of the NHS. The Government have tried to argue that the pandemic showed the need for Ministers to have more powers, but we know that during the pandemic the Secretary of State had powers over PPE and test and trace, both of which issues were handled extremely badly. The NHS’s operational independence is critical, but it will be undone by the introduction of the Henry VIII powers in the Bill, so Liberal Democrats will oppose them Finally, I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) on his impassioned speech. I agree with him wholeheartedly that we have a duty as a nation and as a society to ensure that the goods used in our publicly owned NHS are not tainted by modern slavery or linked to the behaviours that may lead to genocide.