Simon Burns

Conservative Party | Chelmsford West

NHS 60th Anniversary – opposition day debate

House of Commons, Hansard Cols: 247 - 249

Simon Burns: I join the Secretary of State in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) on calling this debate. I am delighted and privileged to be taking part in a debate celebrating 60 years of the national health service.

I have heard many history lessons this evening. I was not even born in 1946, when the legislation went through the House, or in 1948, when the health service was established. However, I know from experience, throughout my life as a user of the health service, that in principle it is second to none. The national health service is what this country wants, and it is what I passionately believe in. It is ludicrous—indeed, I find it quite baffling—to try to make complaints about an era in which we were not alive. If one worked on that argument, one could say that the Labour party still wanted to take us out of Europe, that it supported CND or that it did not believe in war, as George Lansbury, its pacifist leader in the 1930s, proclaimed. However, that is nonsense, because life has moved on, and so have circumstances.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell) and other hon. Members said, it is right that we should all be united on the basic premises and principles of the national health service, even though we may argue and have differences of opinion about how it should be organised and how it should evolve to continue providing a first-class health service for the people of this country.

Why is the NHS so important? Why is this national institution so popular with the vast majority of people in this country, who are more than happy, as I am, to pay their tax pounds to have free health care at the point of use for all who are entitled to use it? One of the reasons is this. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt talked of the four freedoms: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech and freedom of worship. I believe that there is a fifth freedom.

Some hon. Members have talked about the American experience. If we exclude those people who qualify for Medicaid and Medicare, because of their financial poverty or their age, there are more than 40 million people in the United States—working families—who cannot afford health insurance. They do not have the freedom from fear of the next health bill landing on the mat, which might financially destroy their family.
They do not have the freedom from fear that illness might come into the family, either to a child or to a parent, which might financially cripple them. Since 1948, because of our national health service, everyone in this country has had the freedom from those fears.

I passionately believe in and support the national health service, whether it is under a Labour Government or a Conservative Government. Let those people who say that Conservatives are not committed to the health service look back over the past 60 years.

They will see that Conservative Governments were in office for 35 of those 60 years, and nothing was done under those Governments to undermine the principles of the national health service or to seek to destroy it—[ Interruption.] I resent people taking cheap opportunities to try to score party political points when there is no basis in fact for that argument.

Mr. David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Burns: I will not give way, because there is not much time.

We have differed in our approaches over the way in which we believe the health service should operate. There has been too much of a propensity—certainly under this Government, but also under Conservative Governments in the past—for politicians to interfere when they come into office, and to feel that they have to prove their stamina and machismo by making changes, sometimes, it seems, just for the sake of it.

The national health service has had too many changes and reorganisations under successive Governments. It is suffering from a surfeit of change and from fatigue. It needs to be able to settle in with what it has, and to get on with the job that it is meant to be doing—providing first class health care for all.

That is the challenge to politicians of all political parties. The reorganisations and changes have inevitably led to money being wasted and, certainly over the past 11 years, in certain areas, to almost going full circle and coming back to square one, with upheaval and waste of resources in between. That, too, has to stop.

We need a health system in which the medical practitioners, who are the best qualified to make the judgments, make those judgments for the furtherance of patient care, rather than one in which politicians dictate from Whitehall what they believe should be happening. To give the health service that freedom, within its existing principles, would be a tremendous step forward that would benefit patient care and the working of the health service, as well as saving money from waste that could then be reinvested in patient care, which is the most important thing.

We can all find problems in the health service in our constituencies, but this debate is not an appropriate time to express those criticisms. There are other opportunities to make those speeches in the House. Today, we are celebrating the health service. We must celebrate the tremendous people who work day and night to look after patients and to provide patient care: the nurses, the doctors, the consultants and the often-forgotten ancillary workers who are so crucial to the delivery of health care and the working of our hospitals.

They are the unsung heroes of the national health service; they are the people at the front line of patient care and health care, who do so much that is too often unrecognised—not through ingratitude, but because they do their job so well that they become seamless in the whole provision of health care. To them, we owe our thanks and a debt of gratitude for all they do; we should not forget that.

We must also ensure that our local communities have the best facilities and the finest equipment that money can buy to provide health care within the budgets that Governments provide. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood said, it is no secret that this Government have substantially and significantly increased health spending over the last eight years. I, of course, welcome that.

I have to say, however, that they have been in an extremely fortunate position because the strength of the economy over the last 15 years has enabled them to generate the revenue to invest in health care. That is a benefit for all of us. The sadness has been that not enough of it has gone to front-line services. That is why it is crucial that we have mechanisms in an ever-evolving health care system to ensure that we get the maximum amount of money that the state makes available to the health service to front-line services in order to continue to improve and advance the treatment of our patients.

I conclude—I know that others want to participate in the debate—by saying that we should stop the nonsense of Labour Members trying to accuse Conservative Members of not believing in the health service. Government Members may not like it, but we do believe in it. There is no monopoly of caring and belief in the health service on the Government side: we all share an affection, a loyalty and a devotion to the health service.

What we all want to do is ensure that it works at its finest, providing the greatest health care. We may have differences, which we can argue about until the cows come home, but no one should question the motives or the honourable intentions of Conservative Members just because it suits the political agenda of Government Members at election time.