David Davis

I will be careful how I answer the right hon. Member because I have an interest to declare here: I have a disabled grandchild, and her mother is one of the people who suffers the stress he talked about. As I say, we need a humane system that deals with people properly. Our current system for supporting disabled people and people looking after disabled people is incredibly bureaucratic, unpleasant and nasty to deal with. That is not the area of welfare that we need to deal with; it is principally the area of employment that we need to deal with. We want to get people back to work, because there is no better way out of poverty than employment, rather than, as it were, being on the dole. To come back to the thrust of my argument, what is it that we are talking about paying for? I will pick three issues—I could pick any number, but the top three issues that matter to my constituents are healthcare, education and defence. Our health service needs radical reform. I know we have a Bill in this King’s Speech, but it does not look to me like it will have a sufficiently radical impact. For some reason, we do not actually speak enough about the fundamental aims of our health service. Healthcare must be free at the point of delivery—that is an absolute—but it also must do its job of saving lives, and we turn our face away from that too often. Too many Britons are dying early and avoidably under a system that swallows money without delivering the outcomes. Every year, 125,000 deaths are listed officially as avoidable, and the situation has worsened in recent years. It went from 129 deaths per 100,000 people to 156 in the course of a decade. That is a huge increase and, as a result, we have an avoidable death rate that is higher than all our comparator nations. I am not just talking about rich nations like Japan; we are even worse off than countries like Portugal that are much poorer than we are. It is an extraordinary problem that we have to face.