Health and Social Care Bill

I am not saying that savings should not be made. Indeed, the Select Committee in the last Parliament took evidence from the chief executive of the NHS on that particular point. The case that I make is about the type of reorganisation. Not only has nobody in the public sector ever been able to get 4% a year in savings, but nobody in the private sector has, in the time scale being predicted now. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that that is rubbish—it is not rubbish at all. He should go and talk to his advisers about what happens in the real world, as opposed to the world that has appeared since July last year. I would like to say something in defence of managers. This Government have been bashing managers in the NHS every week they have been in office, and did so for many months before they got there. How do they think we got waiting lists for things such as new knee and hip joints down from years to months, and even weeks, in areas such as mine? I will tell them. It was not done by taking the surgeons out of theatres to do the administration, but by putting people in to do the administration so that the surgeons could spend more time in theatres seeing more patients. That is the real truth. The management -bashing that has been taking place of people inside the NHS might be popular on the ground, but let me say this to the Government: if they take those managers out and we go back to the waiting lists and waiting times of five or six years ago, they will see where popularity lies.