National Health Service

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 9:29 pm on 27 October 1983.

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Photo of Kenneth Clarke Kenneth Clarke Minister of State (Department of Health) 9:29, 27 October 1983

It is my pleasant task to congratulate three maiden speakers. It is an easy task because they made three excellent speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Norris) made a competent and eloquent speech. He chose the right subject because he is an experienced member of the east Berkshire district health authority. He will no doubt contribute frequently to our future debates on the Health Service.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warwickshire, North (Mr. Maude) succeeded in making a successful joke within the first two minutes of his first contribution in the House. As it was a joke about Leslie Huckfield, it united the House behind him. He will obviously carry large numbers of hon. Members behind him in his future contributions to our debates.

My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Mr. Hawkins) used his maiden speech to talk about a cause that has already become very much his own—the adequacy of deputising services in the NHS, and the service received by patients in some parts of the country when excessive use is made of such services. I am sure that the whole House appreciated the way in which he brought forward some of the problems with the quality of deputising services. It is largely in response to him that we have asked the family practitioner committees to report on how they are discharging their responsibilities in that area. The reports are almost to hand. We will bear my hon. Friend's recommendations in mind when we move to the next step, which is the evaluation of the response from the committees and also from the public who use the services.

The debate saw a different maiden speech—not from a new Member, but from a new Leader of the Opposition. We all welcome him to his post. We are confident that we will hear that speech again and again. The peroration is much loved by us all but when applied to the NHS does not make a useful contribution to sustained debate outside the House.

One convention when replying to a debate is to say how excellent and useful a debate has been. Because of the contributions from the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Kinnock) and the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), the debate has not been helpful. Unfortunately, a great deal of the debate across the floor has not addressed itself to the issues that concern the NHS. It has turned on the extraordinary claim that the background to the debate is intended cuts, past cuts and future cuts, and that the Government are somehow reducing expenditure and services in the NHS as a whole.

We do not wish to hear any unparliamentary language. On previous occasions I may have sailed near to that by describing that approach as the "big lie" technique. Today the right hon. Gentleman actually accused the Government of premeditated falsehood and claimed that we were perpetuating that falsehood. We will not respond in kind. We make no attack upon the sincerity of the right hon. Gentleman. His falsehoods were unpremeditated and unintended because he had not carried out enough research into the subject on which he chose to embark. He talked about reductions in the standards of care between 1979 and the present time. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in his speech, which immediately followed that of the right hon. Gentleman, gave details of the increased provision of patient care—category by category—that has taken place while we have been in office.

The right hon. Gentleman spoke about the lengthening waiting lists, which he had the nerve to say have grown while the Conservative Government have been in office. The record-breaking level of waiting lists was reached in March 1979. when the figure stood at 752,000. In March 1983 the figure had been reduced to 726,000. What determines waiting lists is, in part, the pace of medical advance. There are all those who are now able to wait for hip replacement operations that were not possible a few years ago. Waiting lists are always with us, but contrary to assertions, they have been declining and continue to decline, except during periods of industrial action backed by the Labour party.

The underlying fallacy in the Labour party's claim is the continued assertion that we have made cuts in spending over the past four years. Many argue about the use of statistics, and I agree with all those hon. Members who say that all that the public want to hear about are patients—that was a word that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich mentioned, I think, only once in half an hour—and that they do not want to get lost in the miasma of statistics.

There are four straightforward statistics which no hon. Member has been able to challenge in this debate or any other. Cash spending has doubled since June 1979. The economic cost to the country, for which purpose one makes a comparison with the retail price index, has increased by 17·5 per cent. If one makes an allowance for the increased cost of medical services there has been a planned growth in service of 7·5 per cent. and capital expenditure is up 14 per cent. It requires a curious use of the English language to continue to use the word "cut" to describe any of that financial provision over the past four years.

There have been even more fanciful attacks on manpower. The hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Madden), in a speech which, although I welcome his return, made me think at one point that he had brought his soap box with him, got carried away when talking about sacked doctors and nurses. I have not yet met a doctor or a nurse who has been sacked as a result of any measures taken by the Government. I shall meet one if the hon. Gentleman can find one. He would not give way during his speech when he saw me trying to rise and challenge him to produce any such individual.

The hon. Member for Fife, Central (Mr. Hamilton) launched in with figures of 20,000 unemployed nurses and 3,000 unemployed doctors. I can only say that those figures are the highest that I have yet heard in the usual fictional accounts that are given about the number of unemployed professionals in Britain and I do not have the slightest idea of his source. The best estimate of unemployed doctors that we have is about 1,000, most of whom are employed for short periods between jobs. If we did not have that many registered unemployed doctors people would be complaining about a shortage because there would be no mobility to enable movement from job to job.