The publication of the Francis report was an incredibly humbling day for our national health service. It was humbling not just for those of us in this place who care about our NHS, but for the many staff who work tirelessly to look after patients and for everybody involved in looking after people as part of our health and care system.
The central plank of the report highlighted the fact that a culture had developed at Mid Staffordshire that was not in the best interests of patients. Targets and bureaucracy had got in the way of delivering high-quality care, and far too often the management of the trust did not listen to the concerns of patients or to the sometimes valid concerns of front-line members of staff.
Robert Francis made a number of recommendations in his report. The Government accepted the principles of the report and we have made great progress in implementing many of the proposals, which I will come on to later.
It is important that all parts of our health and care system learn lessons from things that have gone wrong in our health service. Front-line staff need to learn lessons where appropriate and managers need to learn to listen and respond to the concerns of front-line staff. We need to create a culture that is open and learn how to put things right in the future in order to improve patient care. That is what good health care is about, whether someone works on the front line of the service or whether they are involved as a commissioner, a manager or a Government Minister.
There have been many good contributions to the debate and I will do my best to touch on as many of them as I can in the time available. In particular, there has been strong advocacy for the local NHS. I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for his work and tireless advocacy over many years—including before he became an MP and certainly during his time in this place—on behalf of his local patients and the local hospital and staff who look after them in Mid Staffordshire. Without his long-standing efforts and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), we would not be where we are today and that part of the world would be less better represented. Importantly, they are the people who have asked consistently the difficult questions and allowed us to get to our current position of not just tackling poor care at Mid Staffordshire and putting right the challenges that that has thrown up, but looking at how we can improve pockets of bad care elsewhere in our health and care system.
Most hon. Members have focused on two particular themes, the first of which is the need to learn lessons from the Francis inquiry into what happened at Mid Staffs, for the benefit of the wider health and care system. We heard some very good speeches, particularly from the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Kevin Barron), my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) and my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley). They discussed the broader lessons that can be learned and the importance of an open culture, of supporting clinical leadership and of recognising that perhaps staff are the best advocates of what good-quality patient care looks like in our health system.
In his constructive contribution, my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) noted that the challenges and difficulties faced in Mid Staffordshire arose because the management in particular were blinded by targets, financial incentives and drivers, and lost sight completely of what matters most in a hospital at all times, which is delivering high-quality, good patient care. The biggest lesson we can learn, as my hon. Friend made clear, is that we need always to make sure that the delivery of high-quality care is the first and only driver of what happens on the ward. It should never be about meeting a financial target. Of course, the two are not always mutually exclusive, but in this case it is very clear that things went very badly wrong at that trust.
As was pointed out by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), a significant speech was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), who talked about the importance of parity of esteem between mental health and physical health. He did a lot in his time in government, and he has always been a keen advocate of that. I know that he is very proud, as the Government are, that the 2012 Act has for the first time enshrined in law genuine parity of esteem between physical health and mental health. That was touched on by the Francis report, and the Government can be proud of doing that. As he will know, we have also invested £450 million in improving access to treatment in mental health services. I know that he took that forward in government, and he can be very proud of that record.