National Health Service — House of Commons, 2015-01-21
Topic: Health
Frank Gordon Dobson (Labour, Centre-left): I entirely agree with that. The fact is that the services that can be provided at home need a higher priority than they have had in the past—under any Government. They need more staff with more time, because many of the people attempting to provide a service are given a quarter of an hour to dash in, help somebody wash or cook and then dash out again to rush along to somewhere else. If one person takes up more than a quarter of an hour, they will be late for the next person they are supposed to be looking after. What is more, all these people get lousy pay. In fact, the level of pay that such people get is a disgrace We also need a massive improvement in the co-ordination of services between hospitals, GPs, health visitors, nurses and the people providing those practical cleaning services and so forth. This will cost more. Anyone who pretends that we will not have to pay some more to get a service that works to replace one that does not is either just misleading themselves or—in the worst version—misleading other people Previous Governments have not expanded the services in line with the need, but the recent response of this Government has been to contract the service available, which is indefensible. Proposals under the new regime—if that is the right term, Madam Deputy Speaker—have brought about fragmentation, competition and binding legal contracts between various providers of these services. If anybody thinks that will improve co-ordination, they are again either deceiving themselves or attempting to deceive the rest of us In this country and in this House, we have to wake up to the fact that if we want a first-class service, we are going to have to pay a first-class fare. That was something I wrote in a long and entirely personal memorandum to the Prime Minister, not long before I foolishly resigned as Health Secretary. I pointed out that a massive increase in investment was needed. I am quite proud of some of the things I did when I was Health Secretary. That might have been the most important thing I did, because about two years later, the Government put an extra £40 billion into the health service. To be fair to the Prime Minister, I received a note from him saying, "Your long personal note triggered what we did." I felt pretty glad about that When we talk about these issues, we need to bear in mind that our NHS is easily the most cost-effective system in the developed world. The total we spend on health care is 9.4% of gross domestic product: the Germans spend 11.3%, the French 11.6% and the United States, which has an insurance system like the one the leader of UKIP wants to introduce here, spends 16.9% of their GDP on health, and life expectation there is lower than ours. The other really startling point, when we get people such as the King’s Fund and others demanding reductions in the number of hospital beds, is that for every 1,000 people we have three hospital beds, while the French have more than six and the Germans eight and a half. So far as I know, there is no daft consensus in either of those countries to get down to the British level.