My hon. Friend anticipates me, because this is precisely the issue I am coming on to. Under the Lansley reorganisation, workforce planning went out of
the window, and that led to today’s huge workforce crisis and hospitals being in the grip of private staffing agencies. That is the single biggest driver of the NHS deficit that I mentioned a moment ago, and I will talk about that shortly.
The Secretary of State gave us a pious warning about temperate language, yet this is the Secretary of State who today on the front page of The Daily Telegraph is saying that the NHS has enough cash and now must deliver:
“the time for debating whether or not”
it has enough money is over, it
“now needs to deliver its side of the bargain”.
Not for the first time, that is a statement by the Secretary of State that will have caused jaws to drop across the NHS. People will not forget the time he accused hospitals of coasting when they were in the middle of an A&E crisis, but even by his standards this was a staggering piece of spin.
The simple fact is that the NHS does not have enough money. In fact it is seriously short of money. It is facing a £1 billion deficit this year, with two thirds of hospitals in the red, which marks a major deterioration from what the Conservatives inherited in 2010, when there was a surplus of over £500 million.