It is a real pleasure to be called in this important debate on the NHS in the Queen’s Speech. I join others in paying tribute to the amazing effort of NHS and social care staff in South Suffolk: all the staff at Colchester, Ipswich and West Suffolk Hospitals, our care homes, and the community pharmacy and vaccine teams in primary care who performed such an extraordinary job. Finally, I would particularly like to mention those volunteers who were standing in the snow of winter when we started the vaccine roll-out to help us to achieve what is basically a miracle of delivery of the vaccine. It should make us all proud of the NHS and proud, frankly, to be British.
I just want to make one key substantive point today, given that we are talking about a Bill that will reorganise the NHS: however we do that, we must maintain diversity of provision. I will refer to three key areas. The first is community pharmacy. I am a great fan of community pharmacy. It does a huge amount already, but it has earnt its spurs during the pandemic, giving out over 3 million jabs to date—more than the entire population of Greater Manchester. I have seen in my constituency how community pharmacies can really make a difference. My constituents have chosen them as their preferred place to receive a jab and it shows what more they can do. We must give them a deeper role in the delivery of healthcare in this country.
The second part of this is the voluntary sector, and I am thinking in particular of mental health. In Norfolk and Suffolk we have a struggling mental health trust, but when constituents have come to me with mental health problems in my surgeries—this was pre-pandemic—
and I have been able to refer them to local mental health charities, they have often achieved great improvement in their mental health. Ed Garratt, the brilliant head of our local clinical commissioning group, supports this. We should look at more of the funding that goes to our NHS trusts going directly to those charities so that they become part of mental health capacity.
Finally, we should talk about the independent sector, and on this point I come back to my two earlier interventions on the shadow Secretary of State, because it was extraordinary what we heard today. As I said, Ipswich Hospital was able to double the number of ICU beds it had by moving cancer patients to the local Nuffield hospital. If someone was ideological enough to say, “We won’t work with the independent sector,” they are literally denying that capacity to people who use the NHS and saying, “You can only pay for it.” That is an extraordinary political point and it shows that the Labour party has not moved on from the depths of its dogma. We should deliver the best possible outcomes within the universal NHS, and that means diversity of provision at the heart of its delivery.
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