Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker. Each time I said ““you””, I meant the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State simply threw the Bill at the British public after the Prime Minister had promised that this would not happen. I have been very clear in the speeches I have made so far on the Bill that the only people the Secretary of State is fooling are those in the Tory party. He has made changes to the Bill, but we are now beginning the great mix-up and going back to exactly where we were. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) said that Labour did not want progress and good value, and that the coalition programme was all about ensuring that the NHS survived and getting a good return for the taxpayer. Let me tell him that I am absolutely passionate about the NHS. I expect value for money, cutting-edge treatment, efficiency and the best possible care for everyone in this country. The lives of every taxpayer and every family depend on the care they get from the NHS. Second rate will not do for me at all. However, I do not believe that throwing a grenade into the NHS systems will achieve that. Even breaking big promises will not achieve that, because that will break the trust. I suggest to the Conservative party that the Great British public gave tentative support during the general election and will now withdraw that support rapidly as the Bill progresses. The Conservatives expect the public to believe that the party that promised no top-down reorganisation and then broke that promise can be trusted when it says that there will be no privatisation of the NHS, yet evidence comes to light via freedom of information requests that that is not the case. What are patients out there actually experiencing? Again, Conservative Members can fool themselves. When they went to accident and emergency units they saw that the four-hour waiting time was being exceeded, so they abolished it. It is already taking longer to treat fewer people, which does not strike me as particularly efficient or good value for money. It took 13 years of a Labour Government to rebuild the NHS after what the previous Conservative Government did to it. Labour reduced waiting lists from two years to 18 weeks. It has taken the coalition Government less than a year to wreck it all again. Broken promises are leading us to an NHS that is broken again. Let us look at what is currently happening in the NHS. There are two different processes at work: financial efficiency gains and structural reform. The idea was to ask the system to make efficiency gains of 4% each year for four years. On top of that there is the reorganisation, which a Conservative Member has likened to tossing a grenade into the system. We have had muddle, pause, fog and are now effectively back to where we were some time ago. The reforms do not address the financial challenges, especially the Nicholson challenge. This is costly—making people redundant, throwing organisations into disarray and telling people, ““You don't have a future, you might have a future,”” ““Let's have a cluster, let's not have a cluster,”” ““Where are you going to work?””, ““It's all going to disappear by 2013,”” ““There are no PCTs—well, they're there really, but clusters will do the work,”” ““No, we don't have strategic health authorities—well, okay, we'll keep four of them.”” The Marx brothers would be proud of the stops, turns, U-turns, pauses and muddle that there have been. But the bottom line is that the great British public have to watch those antics and are worried about their health service.