Dave Doogan

The Lords amendments seek to address a clear, present and insurmountable financial challenge for significant elements of health and social care delivery in all our communities. The Government say, in the most spurious and disingenuous way, as though they did not understand their role in the health service, that social care providers, GPs, dentists and pharmacies are contractors. How they are dealt with by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is irrelevant. It is the role that they fulfil in our society and in the delivery of health and social care services that is at stake. These are not contractors that can go and develop new markets somewhere else. Their market is exclusively within the NHS and health and social care up and down these islands. Many properly commercial businesses will not manage to pivot their way out of this attack from Labour—and GP practices, pharmacies, care providers, nurseries and hospices certainly will not. I want to mention hospices. When Macmillan Cancer Support speaks, no matter what colour our rosette, we should listen. It has highlighted clearly what the measures mean for end-of-life care. There have been 15 years of chaos in the United Kingdom, most of it economic; there has been the lost decade of Brexit, and its catastrophic effect on the UK’s economy and the material welfare of people up and down these islands. I ask: who can we blame? Who is culpable? Who has their fingerprints all over it? Not terminally ill children in hospices, who will, as a result of the Bill, suffer as a result of the debilitating effect on the care with which they are provided. The Minister and his Government could do a simple thing: give hospices a derogation from the grasping hand of the Bill, and protect children in the worst imaginable circumstances. From the outset, the Government’s fiscal misadventure has been met with opprobrium from all manner of sections of the economy and society, but they have held firm. I pay tribute to the Minister; he fronts up here every time with a smile, and does his best to defend what he has to. That is his job, and I do not judge him for that, but the bottom line is that the Government have yielded, not to children in hospitals, or to people trying to deliver social care and free up hospital beds by preventing delayed discharge, but to the bankers by restoring their bonuses, and to the non-doms who want all the benefits of living in this country but do not want to pay for it. That speaks volumes about what a Labour Government in this day and age are all about.