May Adjournment — House of Commons, 2018-05-03
Topic: Health
Edward Julian Egerton Leigh (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a question of quality. Is it really necessary to have 30,000 people employed by the NHS, who have never been doctors or nurses and who have never met a single patient, earning over £100,000 a year? We of course need a level of good-quality management, but we must trust the people on the frontline. Whenever we talk to doctors and nurses they say, "Trust us. We are professionals." They are the people that members of the public want to see. They are the ones with the vocation and the professionalism to look after us The hon. Lady makes a fair point and, like all arguments, we could take it to extremes, but in my view there are two models for the NHS. There is the traditional model that I grew up with in the 1950s and 1960s, and there is a newer model with evermore systems, targets, internal markets and the rest. My personal view—this may surprise the hon. Lady—is that the old-fashioned model probably worked better, because it put more competence and more control in the hands of nurses, doctors and consultants I am now going to say something that will probably be even more unpopular. I wonder why our Government are not prepared to bite the bullet and consider alternative funding for the NHS. With an ageing population, we must encourage people to put more of their own resources into their health. How are we going to do that? We could do it through general taxation and increase overall spending, but I have argued against that, or we could do what previous Conservative Governments have done. The Major Government and the Thatcher Government—I do not think the Major Government were particularly right wing—gave tax relief for people of pensionable age towards private health insurance. That is anathema to the Labour party, but it would actually put more resources into health. Most people of retirement age simply cannot afford private health insurance, because they pay for it from their taxed income. However, if we gave tax relief for private health insurance, as previous Conservative Governments have done, we would not be saying that we are against the NHS or devaluing it; we would be trying to encourage the people who are going to use healthcare more often to put more of their own resources into healthcare. I am worried that if this massive real-terms increase in healthcare spending happens, we will be approaching the levels of health spending per head that we see in Germany or France. The fact is—let us be honest about this—that if we are going to be ill, we would much rather be ill in Germany or France. I know that the NHS is a kind of religion for many people, but the health services under the social insurance systems of France and Germany do work better. They cost more, but the people feel that they have real control over their healthcare. They pay large amounts of tax, but they feel that they have some kind of ownership of their healthcare—some kind of right. When something goes wrong, they are not just enmeshed in a vast bureaucratic machine; they believe that they have some right to treatment through social insurance. Indeed, in Germany, they do get that.