NHS and Social Care Commission — House of Commons, 2016-01-28
Topic: Health
Andrew William Murrison (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It comes back to the issue of integrating health and social care. We have to say that some progress has been made in that respect At this point in my contribution, let me make it clear—despite the fact that this is intended as a non-partisan initiative—that I feel very strongly that without a strong economy, we will not make any progress at all. Improvement requires the sort of economy to which we aspire—not one such as has been sustained in Greece, Spain and Portugal. If we look at those three countries, whose healthcare systems were not comparable to ours before their respective crises, we should note what has happened subsequently, as their Governments have struggled to control their economic situation by making huge cuts. We need to be very aware that we have avoided that in this country. Without a strong economy, talking about improving public services across the board—and particularly in the huge area of healthcare—is, frankly, pretty pointless. There will not be the resources to sustain what we have at the moment, let alone the 12% increase suggested by Kate Barker in her report. That is fundamental. I want to give credit to Ministers for sustaining the Stevens plan. We have heard some contributions today suggesting why that the plan might not turn out to be sufficient, but finding that sort of money at a time of austerity is a huge achievement, which should be acknowledged. I was proud to stand only a few months ago on a manifesto that supported the £8 billion spend. That allows us to have a service that is at least sustainable, notwithstanding my fears for the future and the inadequacy of our plans at this point in time, and should take us through to the end of the decade and beyond at a time when local government funding is being cut. That means that the pressure on social services, which was not anticipated by Simon Stevens, applies, while we face further pressures on the public health budget, too. Together, those pressures will mean having a deficit by the end of the decade that will need to be addressed. Beyond that, looking to 2025 and even further as Kate Barker has done, we need to determine how to find the extra funds that she feels are necessary, notwithstanding the dispute about where the funds might come from. I imagine that these issues will be examined by the commission proposed by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk when it is set up Let me finish with a few more small points about public health. Among my distinguished medical colleagues in this place, I believe I am the only one with a postgraduate qualification in public health and the only one who has done a job with a significant public health input. I have a bit of a soft spot for this discipline, and I hope I understand some of what it is about "Healthy Lives, Healthy People" has, in my view, been a success. It has set public health on the right track, handing back to local government a function that it arguably should never have lost, and setting up Public Health England, which I think has done a good job on the whole. I suspect that the Minister, who will answer the debate shortly, will have fallen off his stool when he read the King’s Fund report a little under a year ago, which essentially said the same thing—that public health appears to be on the right track in this country at the moment and that the changes introduced in the White Paper five years ago have largely been successful However, there is absolutely no room for complacency, as I am sure the Minister will agree, particularly when we have healthcare indices on areas such as our rate of teenage pregnancy. Although it has improved, it remains among the very worst in Europe. We do just slightly better than Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia. Nobody here would be satisfied with that, I hope, and while we have public health indices as disastrous as that, there is no room for complacency One of my worries about what has happened over the past several months is that we appear to have changed from a model in which healthcare is pretty much exclusively funded through general taxation—that is to say, national insurance and income tax—to one that is partly funded by local taxation, with all that means when it comes to cuts in hard times. In my view, the sort of public health interventions that are having bits shaved off them at the moment are not discretionary, but essential parts of healthcare We can all come up with wonderful figures to show why we need to invest in healthcare. By and large, public health investment saves money in the long term, but the potential for public health intervention prevention services to have a real impact on people’s lives is truly enormous. Very little of it is going to happen overnight, so it will not show up on people’s metrics—certainly not within an electorally obliging timeframe—but they nevertheless remain If we are setting up a commission to look at how we do healthcare in the very long term, we most certainly need to focus on public health. We need to ensure that resources for public health are maintained and sustained. Those resources are not discretionary, but an essential part of what we should be doing for healthcare in this country—although I accept that when it comes to making economies, it will always be tempting to shave bits off public health services rather than cutting an acute service, which would be much more obvious to the public I support the motion, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for North Norfolk on tabling it. He is right to say that party politicians meddle with this national religion of ours, the national health service, at their peril. If we accept that we face huge challenges in the long term, beyond 2020, it is important that we not only engage in a national debate so that we can address some of the difficult issues that we have discussed this afternoon—the estates, for example, and how we pay for healthcare—but try to gain that usually impossible goal of securing some level of cross-party consensus.