NHS (60th Anniversary)

The Conservative party has tabled a motion saying that ““all political parties”” have supported the NHS. I am not dealing with the vagaries of finance; I am saying that the Conservatives opposed the NHS when it was founded, and came up with a plan to move to a national insurance system, which thankfully was scuppered, and that as recently as the last general election, every single Conservative Member stood on a manifesto that said that people could take money out of the NHS to go private. I point that out merely because of the terms of the motion. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire has tried to put all that in the past, primarily to try to encourage the public to forget what the Tories did to the NHS when they were last in government. That was an era of 18-month and sometimes two-year waits for life-saving operations. It could take weeks to get a GP appointment. As the chief medical officer tells us, when he was working in the north-east an 81-year-old man wrote to him to ask whether he could bequeath his place on the waiting list for a cataract operation to his nephew, who was 60 and developing eye problems. That man had been on that waiting list for 11 years. Waits in accident and emergency were sometimes 24 hours, and infection rates in hospitals soared. Such was the public anger that the debate was not always about how we could save the NHS, but about whether we should abandon it altogether. Now, thankfully, the debate is about how we take the NHS from good to great, and from world class in some aspects to world class in all. Here I come to my quibble with the Conservative motion. While it rightly mentions the need to focus on outcomes, as we are doing, it implies—this point was referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan)—that targets have had no role to play in rescuing the NHS from years of neglect and underfunding.