Helen Morgan

I thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), for securing this debate and for his excellent opening speech. We all know that we have reached a crisis point across the NHS and care sectors, with more patients than ever waiting for treatment. That is affecting not just those in need of care and treatment, but those who work tirelessly across the NHS and care sectors, who are feeling the full brunt of the crisis. The Conservatives have a legacy of hours-long waits for ambulances, treatment in crowded hospital corridors—captured in horrifying detail by the “Dispatches” documentary, which looked into the hospital that serves my constituents in North Shropshire—and communities grinding to a halt under the weight of all sorts of waiting lists and backlogs. We urgently need to move forward. The Secretary of State has repeatedly outlined the need to shift from treatment to prevention and from hospital to community, and the Liberal Democrats absolutely support him in that endeavour—indeed, we called for many measures that would achieve that shift in our own manifesto. Stronger primary care and community services were the strong recommendations of Lord Darzi’s report, which was commissioned by the Secretary of State and has been broadly welcomed. There has been a great deal of consensus across the House today that we need to take those measures, but I fear that these estimates paint a picture of an NHS that continues to pour money into the previous, failing model in which capital budgets are drained to pay for day-to-day services and a huge proportion of increased spending goes on NHS staffing, while community care and primary care providers wrestle with the huge increase in employer national insurance contributions. When that is combined with the decision to scrap targets on mental health and community services for the sake of prioritising targets on elective care, we must ask: when will the stated objectives of the Secretary of State really be matched by actions? The latest estimates are an indictment of the broken state of the NHS after years of Conservative neglect, but we urge the Government to go further and faster to address the failure.