This Health and Care Bill has been conceived in bunkers behind screens within echo chambers. It is straight from the US health market, and its architects are immune to objection from the frontline leaders who are expected to deliver a new health and care system. In case the Government had not observed it, those people are in the midst of managing a pandemic, its resurgence and
its aftermath. They are holding together a fragile workforce, traumatised by the pressure and sacrifice of the covid war. They are vaccinating a nation while seeing others fall to preventable diseases. They are embracing those with broken minds as they try desperately to hold on to their own.
It is no time to strip out the NHS’s infrastructure and replace it—eager as we are to do so—with something as ill-defined, void of detail and illiterate as the Bill presents. The Bill will shift the blame for an imploding NHS and shattered care system from the impervious Prime Minister to NHS workers. The backlogs will be their fault. They will be to blame for service cuts, and the Government will shrug their shoulders at the postcode lottery and rationing. We have more than 5 million people waiting for hospital appointments. We are unable to see a GP for weeks. We are waiting longer than ever at A&E and, when the care system fleeces people for all they have and fails to restore their dignity in their fading years of life, the Bill scapegoats local health and care teams while the Government wash their hands.
We are in this mess because, in 2012, the Government—and, let us not forget, their Lib Dem chums—messed with our NHS, ignored clinicians and seeded the failures that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic. History repeats itself. The market-driven system enabled Ministers to sign away billions of pounds on crony contracts while frontline staff were wrapped in bin bags—and some, tragically, in body bags. The Bill lets the Government off the hook. When things go wrong, they will simply blame others as they avoid shame. But, worse, private companies are already sitting round the tables of the shadow integrated care systems to profit further. Nothing has changed. If the Bill changes nothing, we do not need it to further destroy the remnants of Labour’s precious NHS. At the one time we need certainty, there is none.
The Bill fails to provide the vital stability, funding, accountability or transparency that is needed. It fails on prevention and the advances that patients need. It has more private commissioning, not less, no workforce planning or vital staff pay and, crucially, no social care, yet the NHS will integrate with it. Labour believes that people deserve better. We must have integrated health and social care, free to all in need, wholly delivered in our public sector by fairly rewarded staff and accountable to this Parliament and to the people. Now is not the time and this is not the Bill. I will vote against it.
6.23 pm