NHS Reorganisation

It is a great pleasure to speak after the great tour de force that we heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell). He dispelled a huge number of the myths that the Opposition have been trying to put forward today and during our entire Committee proceedings on the Health and Social Care Bill—one would almost believe that they had not been in power for the past 13 years. It is clear that one of the main reasons why we need to reform the NHS is not just to build on what the previous Government have done in terms of using private sector providers, but to make sure that we put a lot of things right. We are cutting bureaucracy and putting more money into front-line care—that is one of the main purposes of the Bill. Before I develop my arguments about bureaucracy, I wish to pick up on what my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) said in his intervention. He talked about the challenges of dealing with an ageing population. This country undoubtedly faces a big problem in providing health care as a result of many people living a lot longer, although that is a good thing. A lot of people have multiple medical comorbidities as they get older and they need to be looked after properly. The key financial challenge to the NHS is in ensuring that we look after our ageing population, and properly resource and fund their care. So when we cut bureaucracy and put more money into front-line patient care, that is what that is about. When we talk about the need to ensure that the NHS has local health care and wellbeing boards—an NHS that is more responsive to local health care needs—it is a response to the fact that some parts of the country, for example, Eastbourne or my county of Suffolk, have an increasing older population, who need to be properly looked after in terms of funding. That is why it is so important that this Government have committed £1 billion to adult social care and are increasing that. It is also why we are putting an extra £10 billion into the NHS budget over the lifetime of this Parliament—the Labour party would not have done that. On bureaucracy, it is worth reminding the Labour party of a few things it did when it was in power. Under Labour the number of managers in the NHS doubled. In 1999, there were 23,378 managers and senior managers in the NHS, but that figure had almost doubled by 2009, having increased to 42,509.