I, too, congratulate all those Members who have made their maiden speeches in the debate. I thank them and wish them well in their service to the House. If it is not invidious to single out one of them, I should thank the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill), who gave a portrait of a Constituency which contrasts totally with my inner city area. To empasise one point in his contribution, I support him in urging the Government to obtain accurate information before making decisions about health provision.

I wish to present a case study of a hospital visit. The Minister recently visited Leeds to open a charity-built bungalow for families visiting Killingbeck hospital, and to look at NHS provision in the city. Many people in Leeds reman deeply sceptical about the purpose and result of that visit in terms of the Government's promotion of good health and wonder whether the Minister took back to the Department a searching concern to tackle the real and increasing health needs not just in Leeds but throughout the country.

Crucial to this debate is the context in which the Minister's message of good health promotion is promulgated. The Minister has received representations from the Leeds western health authority, which faces a budget crisis this year. In September it announced a budget deficit of about £750,000 in the current financial year. The chairman has spelt out what that crisis means. He says that it is the result of Government underfunding for agreed national pay awards for staff, which absorb any notional budget growth, and of the fact that there was no extra provision in the budget for growth to meet increased needs such as AIDS treatment and child abuse. Moreover, there was no recognition in the setting of that budget of the fact that technology needs updating in a teaching hospital and that such hospitals receive many tertiary referrals. As the Minister commented on her visit to Leeds: What my visit has taught me is that we have in Leeds one of the greatest teaching hospitals in the world and we must not lose that. The practical implication of that statement is surely that there must be proper budgets to back up the hospital and its provision.

As a result of the budget crisis, health authority managers have had, in their words, to lower the budget ceiling of the service. That has meant the closure of wards. It is predicted that one ward at the Leeds general infirmary will be closed for the next eight years. A surgical ward has been reduced to five-day working and there are insufficient resources to cope with child abuse. Support services to handicapped children in the community have been reduced and there are cash limits on orthopaedic and rheumatology appliances and on the purchase of the newly developed drugs to which the Minister referred at the start of the debate. There has been no progress in promoting good health policies, which are being reduced to no more than lip service.

When the Minister made her fact-finding visit to Leeds, child cancer victims were queueing for beds. Surely the health of our children is the key to the future good health of the nation. One of my constituents, three-year-old Danielle Wilson, is a cancer victim. The Leeds children's cancer ward, which covers the whole of Yorkshire and Humberside, is desperately overstretched and underfunded. About 85 new cases are diagnosed each year and more beds are urgently needed.

The Leeds cancer centre is one of 90 in Britain and I understand that only the Bristol centre is anywhere near adequately funded. Charities have to raise funds to pay the wages of doctors working in the Leeds centre. The Yorkshire Evening Post is supporting a campaign for the extension of provision to cover child cancer victims. A report on the problem is with the Minister and it would be helpful to hear from her what immediate steps the Government intend to take.

When the Minister was told about the crisis facing the children's cancer unit in Leeds, she said: It tears my heart out. That is not an adequate response. She has a responsibility to demand practical action from her Department. Her responsibility includes challenging the Treasury which is pressing for reduced NHS provision. Treasury-dominated budget reductions are translated by the new managers of health authorities into the language of "productivity and throughput". Patients are being regarded as units of production; people's needs are being written out of the equation.

My local health authority treasurer told me that Treasury-led budget planning was not sufficiently sophisticated to take account of people's needs and of matters such as the demographic evidence of the increasing number of elderly people in certain areas. In that case, we need to ask why health authorities are not budgeting for the increased health needs of our people.

I should like to ask the Minister to take action on what she learned as a result of her ministerial fact-finding visit.

In the present context that must mean challenging Government budget attitudes and increasing budget provision for the National Health Service. The Minister must challenge the Treasury limits because people need to be convinced that NHS provision is not being reduced to ministerial media events. The Minister's contribution to this debate will simply be regarded as cosmetic in the context of the popular experience of reducing National Health Service provision.