National Health Service

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 5:42 pm on 20 November 1996.

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Photo of Mr Norman Fowler Mr Norman Fowler , Sutton Coldfield 5:42, 20 November 1996

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's statement that we are not talking about the whole of the NHS. I will make a specific point about NHS trusts that is the exact opposite of his point, but I am glad that at any rate some sanity is beginning to reassert itself in the general debate on the health service.

However we measure it, in the past 17 years more resources have been devoted to the NHS, more patients have been treated than ever before, and more new hospitals have been built. I do not remember receiving a reply to my question to the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury, who leads for the Opposition, about capital cuts in the 1970s. Waiting times have come down and nurses' pay has improved. The Government gave them a Nurses and Midwives Pay Review Body, which the profession had wanted and which has had a profound effect on the pay of nurses throughout the service.

In addition, the Government have made a commitment on the health service's future funding, which compares starkly, as anyone who has listened to the debate would agree, with what is coming from the Opposition Front-Bench team. I hope that, before the Opposition call another supply day on this subject, we might at least receive some replies to the questions of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health.

The hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Gunnell) raised a point about the trusts. One of the trusts' impressive features has been the way in which they are now able to respond quickly to some of the problems in the health service. We deceive ourselves if we think that there will never be problems in the health service. Twelve months ago, my local hospital of Good Hope in Sutton Coldfield was at the centre of a storm. There was a great dispute about waiting times and patients waiting on trolleys. What has been impressive is the way in which the dispute has been handled, thanks particularly to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health. We now have a new reception area, a new ward for receiving accident and emergency patients and two new operating theatres. That is the impressive way in which the trust has responded.

I do not say to the hon. Gentleman that, in some miraculous way, this is going to guarantee for all time that there will not be problems and crises. No one can guarantee that. Let us be adult about that and accept it, but the new facilities have had a profound effect on morale in the hospital. Anyone who visits it will understand and recognise how much they are welcomed.

I should like to deal with the central point of this debate, and to concentrate on the section of the Opposition's motion that the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury rightly concentrated on, as did my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health. It states: That this House reasserts its belief in the fundamental principles of the National Health Service … that health care should be available to all, based on need and not on ability to pay … and seeks to restore the ethos of the NHS to that of a public service, not of a commercial competitive business. That brings us to the crucial and persistent charge made by the Opposition against the Government for the past 17 years: that we are somehow concerned with moving away from the principle that health care should be available to all, based on need and not on ability to pay, and that we are concerned with—although I welcome the fact that, for once, the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury did not use the word—privatising the health service. That is arrant nonsense, but it has not prevented the scare from being run, year after year and in every election in which I have taken part since 1979.