Debate on the Address

The hon. Gentleman must be right: there has been lose lending and lose borrowing by the banks in the wholesale markets. Of course, the directors of those banks—Northern Rock, in particular—cannot escape their own responsibility for ensuring that their banks were liquid as well as solvent. Equally, there is a supervisory system, which the Labour Government put in place in 1997, and it has clearly failed. There was confusion. When I asked the Governor during a sitting of the Treasury Committee who was in charge of the tripartite system, he famously replied, ““Define what you mean by in charge.”” That tells us all that we need to know about why people were queuing around the block to take out their money. I want to turn finally to the national health service. If there is a single document that sums up the Blair-Brown years, it is the Healthcare Commission report on the tragedy that affected the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in my constituency. The report should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the destructive tension in place between clinicians and managers, between senior managers and the board and between the trust and Ministers in Whitehall. The Healthcare Commission, of course, identified the gaps in cleanliness, nursing and so on, but it also identified the culture of targets—not simply clinical targets, but financial targets—that the trust was fixated on having to meet. Of course, it is true that the trust was poorly led. It was incompetently managed. It did not have the calibre of senior management to cope. But it is also true that that trust was under enormous pressure from Whitehall to clear a huge deficit, year after year. If hon. Members read the report, they will see that the reluctance to employ extra staff, to change the various practices and to tackle some of the deep-seated problems at the three hospitals the trust is in charge of sprang very largely from the financial constraints imposed on the trust by Ministers in Whitehall. As a result, 90 people in west Kent sadly lost their lives, with C. difficile at least a contributory factor. That was not a private company. Those were not contractors. It was an acute NHS trust in the front line of patient care, running three hospitals. The answer that the Prime Minister gave was to set up yet another regulatory body. That will not deal with the problem; we need a better run, more accountable national health service in which local communities can have real confidence. The Government have had 10 years to start to tackle those problems and get these things right. The reform that has been endlessly paraded in front of us has not been real reform. Billions of pounds have been wasted. We end up, 10 years later, with an education system that fails half of our children, with a criminal justice system where criminals cannot be sent to jail because the Government have failed to build enough prison places, with a Government who have not a clue how many immigrants are here, whether or not they are taking British jobs, and with a national health service that is killing the very patients for whom it is supposed to care. There has to be a better way.