Contribution
I too congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle). She covered a huge amount within her allotted time. The only sadness is that we have only an hour, and I have only a couple of minutes to try to address many of her points.
The biggest message that we take home today is that Bolton must not be left behind. The hon. Member has been exemplary in stepping forward and making that case. I would slightly and gently push back and say that I do not think that Bolton was left behind by the previous Government. The trajectory she is working towards is already there, if we look at examples of the investment that was made by the previous Government, most notably the £20 million, which made up part of the £40 million in levelling-up funding, for the medical college at the Royal Bolton Hospital, and listen to Professor Holmes, who said:
“It is incredibly rewarding for us at the University to witness our flagship facility reach this important milestone of practical completion.
It is a privilege to be home to one of the nation’s leading clinical skills facilities here in Greater Manchester and this is a key step in our aim to become a national centre of excellence for health.”
On top of that, there was a £20 million investment in the elective care centre, which has opened with four theatres dealing with about 5,000 patients. The hon. Member for Bolton North East was right to pick up on the maternity and women’s health unit, which is really important. In 2023, we saw a £38 million investment to help the unit, and it will hopefully be done by 2027. I have no doubt that she will be there to wag the stick to make sure that it is. I hope that she and the Government will be successful in that.
I want to tease out a couple of questions for the Government. The hon. Member stressed maternity, which is really important. At the general election, the Labour party made firm commitments on maternity services, so I ask the Minister: when will the national maternity safety ambitions be published, and will targets be set around the maternity mortality gap? What will be done to address it?
The hon. Members for Bolton North East and for Bolton South and Walkden (Yasmin Qureshi) both rightly raised the integration of system and service, which is also a concern on the Opposition side. We have seen top-down reorganisation, especially around integrated care boards, and I am sure the Greater Manchester integrated care partnership will have been asked to make reductions in its headcount.
The problem is that the Government have not set out how they will pay for those redundancies, or what that shape will look like, so they are trying to make transformative change and looking internally. There is real concern about that among the Opposition, so I hope the Minister will be able to set out how much that will cost and whether the redundancy package will be coming forward, because we hear it could be up to £1 billion. As the chief executive of NHS England has said, if we do not hear something in the next few weeks, the NHS will have to turn to plan B—if there is a plan B. I would be grateful if the Minister could set that out.
Finally, on GPs, we also know that the Government have stated in the 10-year plan that GP leaders will be pivotal in shaping and delivering these new services and will be supported to do so with two new contracts from 2026. Of course, we have learned in the past couple of weeks that GPs have entered a formal dispute with the Government because of the contractual changes, so I would be grateful to understand what the Minister is doing—although it is not in her brief—and what her team are doing to try to pull it back from the brink and hopefully resolve some of the contractual issues, particularly when it comes to access.
To close on a personal note, I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton North East on her work as a manbassador. As someone who, since stepping into this House, has campaigned on mental and physical health for men and boys, I know it often gets left behind. I made that point on the Floor of the House only a couple of weeks ago, so it is fantastic that she is championing men and boys. We need advocates for both sexes, both ways round, when it comes to men’s and women’s health. It is not a competition; it is not one or the other—it is “and”, and she typifies that. No man or boy should be left behind, but nor should Bolton.