NHS (60th Anniversary)

Indeed. This country has gross inequalities in health outcomes. That issue has not been focused on particularly in this debate, but we ought to focus on it. Health inequalities in this country continue to be completely unacceptable, and indicators suggest that they are getting worse, not better. I fully recognise that the causes of those inequalities are often well beyond the remit of the national health service, but the NHS has a role to play. Part of that role is to ensure equal access to health care, which we simply do not have at the moment, and that should be addressed. In some areas of health care, particularly those which are not subject to targets, access is still poor. I want to focus on mental health. Under the Freedom of Information Act, we did a survey asking mental health trusts across the country how long people have to wait for access to cognitive behavioural therapy. In some parts of the country, people have to wait more than two years; in many areas, the wait is more than one year. Given the view of clinicians that outcomes improve significantly as a result of early access to such treatment, it remains a scandal that people are having to wait so long for something that could make a real difference to them. One of the themes on which I want my party to continue to focus is the inequality between the treatment of patients suffering from mental health problems and the treatment of those suffering from physical health problems. That disparity cannot be justified, and must be remedied. In recent years, when trusts throughout the country got into financial difficulties and trusts were forced to deal with their balances, it was public health budgets that suffered, although they can do so much to prevent health problems from developing in the first place. The experiment that has taken place over the past decade, involving top-down command and control and big government, has clearly been found wanting. It has failed in so many respects. We see gross waste and inefficiency, and a dependency culture in which no innovation takes place at local level because the Government dictate everything to primary care trusts and hospitals. We see funding that always has strings attached, because the Government know best how the money should be spent. We see micro-management from Whitehall: the Government tell every hospital in the country to undertake a deep clean, at vast expense. The clinicians tell us that that is not the best way to tackle hospital-acquired infections; but the Government know best. Then there is the debacle of the Medical Training Application Service—[Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) wish to intervene? It appears that she does not. I was talking about the MTAS debacle. The Government sought to impose an entirely new system for the recruitment and selection of junior doctors throughout the country without piloting it first to establish whether it would work, leaving chaos in its wake. Similarly, we have an IT system that has been imposed from the centre.