Crispin Blunt

Conservative Party | Reigate

Reigate MP meets Health Secretary over Local Hospital Deficit

Crispin Blunt, MP for Reigate, this afternoon met with the Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt, to discuss the deficit at East Surrey Hospital an hour after David Cameron raised the issue of deficits with the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. The meeting was unexpectedly timely following the dismissal yesterday of Sir Nigel Crisp as Chief Executive of the whole NHS, over the issue of deficits. Mr Blunt has requested the meeting over a month ago on hearing that Laura Moffat, MP for Crawley, had presented the Secretary of State with a petition.

Crispin Blunt requested the meeting on the grounds that the East Surrey and Crawley hospitals, managed by the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, had already been subjected to direct political interference under a previous Labour Health Secretary. The cost of this is estimated at over £30 million and continues to cost the Trust over £11 million a year. Mr Blunt published a memorandum on that political interference just over a year ago and it is attached to this press release. Mr Blunt explained to the Secretary of State his views on the previous political interference and asked the Secretary of State to free the local management from the actuality, and indeed the threat, of future interference. This was especially the case given the seriousness of the deficit at this Trust, which is now the worst in the country. Crispin Blunt made clear his confidence that the local management of the Trust would be able to find a way out of the crisis if it had the freedom to manage the Trust as it saw fit and did not have to carry the burden of the costs arising from previous political direction.

He pointed out to the Secretary of State that the Trust has been wrestling with an inbuilt structural deficit since it was formed in 1998. Five different sets of managers and turnaround teams have already failed to improve the financial performance within the targets and other restraints imposed upon them by the Department of Health. The Secretary of State expressed her confidence in the newly appointed Chief Executive of the Surrey and Sussex Strategic Health Authority as one of the best managers in the country; Mr Blunt pointed out that the same had been said of Ken Cunningham when he was appointed to run the Trust in 2001. Crispin Blunt commented:

“I was able to communicate to the Secretary of State that provision of hospital care to my constituents had been and continued to be subjected to disgraceful political interference. Whilst I did not expect her to publicly accept this I did appreciate the opportunity for me to set out this perspective. My main purpose was to invite her to allow the local management to manage their way out of this crisis - rhetoric which appears in the Government’s own Health White Paper. I asked her to find a way to give a signal that this would indeed be the case. However, she made it clear that, for the time being, this hospital Trust was going to be of interest to all levels of management within the NHS because of the size of the deficit."

Crispin Blunt went on to say:

“I fear this will make it very difficult for the hospital Trust Chief Executive Gary Walker and his board to have confidence that every decision they make will not be second-guessed by the current strategic health authority in the first instance, the new strategic health authority in the second instance or Department of Health officials. Most of all their decisions must not be undermined by the malign influence that has caused so many of their problems: the politics of the marginal parliamentary constituency of Crawley, which has bedevilled this Trust from the beginning in 1998.

“The standard reaction to the difficulties which this Hospital Trust faces is for senior parts of the health service to blame the management and then sack them. It is ironic that this treatment has now been meted out to the Chief Executive of the whole NHS.”

Click here for the January 2005 briefing