NHS Reorganisation

I agree with what my hon. Friend said during the rest of his speech as well, which was that we should at least listen to the ambulance trusts and to others around them. It all seems very peculiar, when none of the ambulance trusts have campaigned for regional operation. I then asked the Minister about dentists. I said that I could not find any dentists for my constituents in the southern part of my constituency and asked him to tell me where they could be found. He sent a letter back and said, ““I rang up NHS Direct and here is a series of dentists.”” I looked at them. Half of them no longer took NHS patients or had closed their books, and the other half of them were in Frinton. He had not noticed that there is a river between us and Frinton, so instead of the dentists being 10 miles away, they were 45 miles away, unless people can swim. That shows the Government’s understanding of my locality. It was a rude letter, too, because it suggests that I could have found out the information for myself—and I probably should have done that, given the sense and intelligence of the answers that I received from the Government. The Government are now going back to the same pattern as the one that they abolished three years ago in many of the areas that they are talking about. As was suggested by the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy), who spoke for the Liberal party, the Government are demanding ““anything so long as it’s bigger””—I am not sure that she is quite right—unless they can make it a region, when the region is the answer. The Government are also demanding that we should take seriously their definition of PCTs. PCTs are nothing other than the creatures of the Secretary of State, but she is busy pretending that if the PCT loses money, it is nothing do with her, nothing to do with the control from the centre and nothing to do with the SHA. She says that that is to do with the PCTs. So the Government reappoint the people who made the mistake and fine the locality for the mistake that has been made, because those sums must be found in so short a time that no sane organisation would possibly consider doing so. I thought that I would find out whether any Minister at the Department of Health had ever run a large organisation, and I find that none of them has done so. There is not a chief executive of any major company, nor even a chief executive of a Government organisation among them. All they have run are things that other people have decided on, and they are now asking us to believe that we should blame the PCTs for the mistakes that have been made by central Government, when those mistakes have been made necessary because central Government have fiddled the funding formula, so that in many areas, particularly in the south and south-east, we are underfunded. We are therefore asked to be serious about consultation. My local PCT has now consulted on three separate ways to deal with the problems of my constituency in less than 18 months, each of which is dramatically different, and we are told that each has been proposed entirely for clinical reasons. I do not believe that; no one in Suffolk believes it; not even the local Labour party believes it. The only person who does believe it is the hon. Member for Ipswich (Chris Mole), who is looking for a job. No one else believes it. I therefore went to see the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Doncaster, Central—a person whom I respect—and she turned half way through the meeting to the SHA representative and said, ““Well, none of these new changes will come in until they’re ready, and when they’re ready and they take over, then we’ll close the hospitals.”” She was told, ““Oh no, you’re wrong, Minister: we close the hospitals first, because we haven’t got the money to make the changes.”” What are the changes? They are to ask for care in the community. We still do not have sufficient people to carry out care in the community now, without the changes. There are no more people to do that work in Felixstowe and Aldeburgh and along the coast that I represent—and if I may say so, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as you are unable to speak, in your constituency next door exactly the same is true. Those who can pay cannot find people to that work, and we must try to pretend that the poor in my constituency should be faced with an inferior service because money must be saved to pay for debts that now stretch back for years. I find it impossible to take seriously the Government on the health service. Those of us who represent constituencies such as mine know that the Government have presided over the worst changes to the health service that we can remember. I have represented my constituency for nearly 30 years, and now know that the health service that the Government leave will be significantly worse than the one that I was able to welcome when I was first elected to the House.