Wes Streeting
MP for Ilford North · Labour · United Kingdom
“We hope for the best and plan for the worst in terms of the continuation of this war, but we are also actively working to prepare for conditions in which a ceasefire has been agreed by Ukraine, with Ukraine and, from our perspective, for Ukraine.”
“The threats we face are not only evolving; they are getting closer to home. Every day, the UK and our allies encounter espionage, cyber-attacks and military posturing by hostile states.”
“One discipline I have to bring to the Ministry of Defence, drawing on my experience at the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS, is to ensure there is no culture of routine overspending, that we are improving productivity, that we deliver value for money and that we recognise that the money we are investing in defence comes wi…”
“With permission, I will make my first statement to the House as Secretary of State for Defence on Ukraine, the ongoing threat from Russia and the Government’s approach. It is not yet clear whether freedom or tyranny will define the 21st century. What is clear is that the United Kingdom will not be a bystander in that struggle.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that very serious and important issue. She will understand that, as a matter of policy, I will not comment on intelligence, but I will address the reports she has raised.”
“We know that this Prime Minister and this Chancellor are both fully committed to funding our nation’s defence, including meeting our NATO commitment of 3.5% by 2035 and setting out an earlier 3% commitment at the next spending review.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,504 lines we hold for Wes Streeting, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 44 of 91.
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. You have clearly had a happy Easter. The fact is that the Government’s failure to fix the social care crisis is causing huge pressures on the NHS. As of last week, more than 20,000 patients were fit to leave hospital but could not be discharged because the care was not available, which means that 22,000 patients each month are waiting more than 12 hours in A&E and that heart attack and stroke victims have to wait more than an hour for an ambulance. We are used to hearing about winter crises, but is it not the case that, after more than a decade of underinvestment in the NHS, a failure to fix social care and the absence of a plan even to address the staffing challenge in the NHS and social care, we have not just a winter crisis but a permanent crisis in the NHS?”
“Why does the Health Secretary think he has any licence to lecture the British people on their moral duty to pay taxes when he spent so many years avoiding his own?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would just say to the Secretary of State that he should be careful what he wishes for. I hope he will at least reply to the letter I sent him last Thursday—I will place a copy in the Library of the House. He has been stonewalling journalists’ questions, but since he says he wants to talk about the Government’s record, let me ask him about that instead. We went into the pandemic with NHS waiting lists already at 4.5 million. We went into the pandemic with NHS staff shortages of 100,000. We went into the pandemic with social care staffing vacancies of 112,000. So it is not just the case that the Tories did not fix the roof while the sun was shining; they dismantled the roof, removed the floorboards and now they have no plan to fix it. Where is the Secretary of State’s plan to fix the NHS crisis?”
“I cannot imagine the trauma of losing a child and we owe it to mothers who have been through that suffering to ensure that they are never let down again. This is not a party political point. The review spans two decades under Labour and Conservative Governments. I want to acknowledge that and be honest about that. The clear finding is that we must safely staff our maternity wards. Today, midwives are leaving the NHS in greater numbers than it is able to recruit them. That is just one of the reasons why we need a workforce plan for the NHS.”
“The Health Secretary has admitted that the Government will not meet their manifesto commitment to recruit the 6,000 GPs we need to get people seen on time and we know that many cases will simply present in overstretched accident and emergency departments. Today, we heard about the consequences of the failure to safely staff our health service. On that note, I want to place on record my thanks to the Secretary of State for Health for his response to the Ockenden review—and to his predecessor, the Chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) for commissioning the review in the first place—and the commitment to implement in full not its recommendations, because Donna Ockenden has not made recommendations, but the must-dos she has set out.”
“It is not just patients who are dissatisfied with the NHS. I know from speaking to frontline staff and NHS leaders across the country that they are exhausted after their heroic efforts of the past two years. They are burned out, they are overstretched, and there are simply not enough of them. They are proud of the NHS and proud to work for the NHS, but, in too many cases, people are going home at the end of a long shift and agonising about whether they did the right thing, agonising about whether they made the right decisions for their patients and agonising about whether they had forgotten a crucial detail. It is getting worse, not better. Some 27,000 NHS workers voluntarily left the health service in just three months last year, the highest on record.”
“Cancer patients are not being seen by specialists on time; they are waiting too long for diagnosis when every day matters. Stroke victims are being left to wait hours for an ambulance—except in the north-east, where over the winter heart attack patients were told to phone a friend or call a cab. It is therefore no surprise to learn today that public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest level in 25 years, since 1997. Of course, that was the year when Tony Blair led Labour to victory at the general election and delivered shorter waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS. The Government could do a great deal of good by learning from the example left by the last Labour Government and trying to rebuild the legacy that they have trashed over the last 12 years.”
“I also thank Liz Cronin and Richard Bourne for supporting the shadow Lords team. The NHS is facing the greatest crisis in its history. Covid has not gone away, and the covid pressures on the NHS certainly have not gone away. Instead, it is in the unenviable position of having to deal with those ongoing challenges at the same time as trying to address the significant backlog that existed before we went into the pandemic, when a record 4.5 million people were already on NHS waiting lists. Today, we see that there is a staff shortage of 110,000 across the NHS as well as 105,000 vacancies in social care. Six million people are now waiting for NHS treatment—the longest waiting lists on record—and they are waiting longer than ever before.”
“It was a great pleasure to see the Minister at the Dispatch Box, but I must warn him and the Minister for Care and Mental Health, the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), that the Government will not convince us that their position on workforce is right even by sending out the most charming members of their Health team. I will go into the reasons for that. I start with enormous thanks to Members of the House of Lords for the enormous amount of work that they put into making the Bill much better than it was when it left the House of Commons. In particular, I thank my noble Friends Baroness Thornton, Baroness Merron and Baroness Wheeler who showed great wisdom and stamina in forging huge alliances in the other place to get the consensus needed to make the improvements that we are discussing.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. It is certainly the case that refugees fleeing Ukraine—indeed, other conflict zones around the world—bring enormous skills to our country. For as long as they are here and living with us, we should enable them to make whatever contribution they wish. If some of the people from Ukraine or elsewhere want to work in the NHS, we should absolutely welcome them with open arms.”
“Member for South West Surrey took over as Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, I was really nervous about the prospect of a former Health Secretary effectively marking his own homework, but on this issue, he has shown a degree of honest reflection and has genuinely contributed his experience to the debate about the future of health and social care in this country. Not only has he been honest about where he fell short, and where other Conservative Ministers may have fallen short, but he is determined to make sure that we improve the quality of the health and social care debate in this House. I very much welcome his contribution to the debate about the NHS workforce challenge.”
“All we are talking about today is an independent review of how many doctors, nurses and other staff the NHS needs for the future. That is not just a view put across by Labour Members: it is supported by many Members right across the House, including the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey, who is a former Health Secretary. It is not the first time that he has helped to unite the sector, although I remember the days when it was sometimes united in opposition to, rather than in support of, his proposals. I will say this, actually: when the right hon.”
“Many of those people who are suffering mental health crises are the very people who are still turning up for their shifts in the hospitals, still turning up for their shifts in the GP surgeries, and still turning up at work to help care for others even though they are in need of care themselves. Lords amendment 29 does not commit the Government to hire thousands more doctors and nurses, although they should. It does not commit to new funding for the NHS, although it desperately needs that. It does not even commit the Government to finally publish the workforce strategy the NHS is crying out for, despite the fact that the NHS has not had a comprehensive workforce strategy since the Labour Government’s plan was published in 2003.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right and she will know of our party’s ambitious commitments, outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), to ensure that patients receive guaranteed mental health treatment within a month. That would be revolutionary. It will require investment and require recruiting the people we need to help provide that care, but this country is living through a mental health crisis on top of everything else. This has been a deeply difficult two years for our country during the pandemic. Many people bear not just the physical scars and ongoing physical health consequences of long covid, but the grief, the loss and the injury to their mental health and wellbeing caused by this deadly pandemic.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. If I am honest, I suspect that the Minister and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care also agree that Lords amendment 29 is needed. I suspect the truth is that they are not the ones blocking it. They are in a Treasury-imposed straitjacket from the Chancellor, preventing them from doing what they know to be necessary for the NHS, because the Treasury would rather stick its head in the sand and not acknowledge the scale of the challenge or the reality of the cost. It hopes that ignorance is bliss and that we can carry on as we are, and perhaps nobody will notice—even the 6 million people on NHS waiting lists.”
“I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. To be honest, I do not know whether No. 10 or No. 11 is running the show. We hear that the Chancellor also blocks the Prime Minister from time to time. I can think of a few occasions during lockdown where that would have been good, if the Chancellor had bolted the door to the back garden, but we will not dwell on that now, Madam Deputy Speaker, because you will tick me off—”
“With the best will in the world, and with the best training available at our brilliant medical schools, doctors and nurses take years to develop the skills and experience to make them outstanding clinicians. Those are the people we risk losing at this very moment. While I have the opportunity, may I say to the Minister that I cannot understand why there are 791 medical school graduates who still do not have a junior doctor post? These people are qualified, they are ready and there is a shortage—get them to work!”
“When I ask frontline staff, “What would make the single biggest difference to your morale? What would be the thing that keeps you going even though you are exhausted, stressed and burned out?”, their answer is very simple: they just want to know that the cavalry is coming and that significant numbers of staff will be recruited to help provide the support they need. Their greatest fear is that the people who have slogged their guts out to get us through the pandemic will be left alone as they try to help the NHS to recover from the pandemic and from the problems that existed before it. If we are not careful, we will risk losing those staff, creating even greater pressures—a greater cost to patient care, a greater cost to patient safety and a greater cost in recruiting and training new doctors and nurses.”
“Previous iterations of the framework have not quantified the staffing numbers needed. The Secretary of State was recently unable to confirm when he appeared before the Health and Social Care Committee that the revised framework will set out the required numbers of staff. The truth is that the recent past is littered with promises of workforce strategies and frameworks that have either not materialised or failed to deliver the action needed. Let me turn to the Minister’s claim that we have record numbers of doctors and nurses—it is today’s equivalent of, “You’ve never had it so good.” We all know—he knows this very well—that the population is growing and ageing, and as it does so, we need the numbers of nurses, doctors and carers to keep up. This is a question not just of recruitment, but of retention.”
“As you already are, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I could not resist. The problem is that unless we face up to the scale of the workforce challenge, the Government simply will not deliver the shorter waiting times that patients need until they break out of their straitjacket. They should start today; otherwise, patients will be left wondering why they are paying more in taxes but waiting longer for care. Government Members may argue that we do not need Lords amendment 29, because there is a planned update to “Framework 15”, Health Education England’s 15-year strategic framework for workforce planning— [ Interruption. ] My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) cannot wait; she is watching her inbox daily, waiting for it to arrive. The truth is that this is inadequate.”
“That really will not cut it. The recruitment of staff already announced by the Government really will not cut it. For as long as we allow this situation to continue, patients will wait longer. They wait in agony. Their health outcomes are worse, and they lose confidence in the national health service. It is the greatest institution that this country has ever built, and it is going through the greatest crisis in our history. Let us be honest about that—with ourselves, with the NHS, and with the country—and support their lordships in their amendment.”
“After the scandal of billions in taxpayers’ money being handed out to mates for duff PPE and testing contracts, and PPE literally going up in smoke—along with taxpayers’ money—we hope that this is the start of Ministers’ looking again at where they went wrong during the pandemic. This afternoon the House faces a simple choice. We must decide whether we are going to be honest with ourselves, with the NHS and with the country about the genuine staffing challenge in health and social care—and whether we are going to have a more responsible and grown-up political debate about how we meet that challenge—or whether we prefer to be the ostriches of the Treasury, with our head in the sand, pretending that these issues will go away, hoping for the best, hoping to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the NHS through new efficiency targets.”
“Keeping patient data safe is important. It can be powerful when it is used well, and has enormous potential for better population health and better clinical outcomes in individual cases, if data is used wisely, safely and ethically. The amendment will keep statutory protections in place for a patient data “safe haven” across health and social care, required for national statistics and for commissioning, regulatory and research purposes. It also ensures that NHS England does not take on this responsibility, because of a potential conflict of interest in its role. Lords amendments 42 to 46 deal with procurement. We welcome these changes. The years of the pandemic have also been years of crony contracting.”
“Lords amendment 89 deals with a related issue, prohibiting organ tourism involving both forced organ harvesting and black market organ trafficking. We welcome this change in the Bill, which amends the Human Tissue Act 2004 to prohibit UK citizens from travelling to countries such as China—although the wording of the amendment is not country-specific—for the purpose of organ transplantation. The restrictions are based on ensuring that there is appropriate consent, no coercion, and no financial gain. In some parts of the world, organs are not given freely but are taken by force, and we must bear that in mind in the drafting our legislation. Lords amendment 57 is intended to retain the current safe haven for patient data within NHS Digital, and to prevent NHS England from taking on responsibility for it.”
“Ministers have argued that the new powers are necessary to ensure democratic oversight of health service decisions, but the existing system allows appropriate democratic oversight and allows contentious service change decisions to be resolved. I do not believe that the wholesale upheaval of the system and the introduction of sweeping new powers for the Secretary of State are justified. Let me now deal with some of the other amendments— very briefly, as I am conscious of time. We support Lords amendment 48, which requires the Secretary of State to ensure that health service procurement does not violate the UK’s international genocide obligations. The amendment is consistent with the UK’s obligations under the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.”
“I worry about how decisions turn into a political football either side of a general election and become a party political knockabout, when the primary consideration should be patients’ safety and concerns. Although I have cited an example in which saving our A&E was the right decision, I can think of cases right across the country in which communities feel very strongly, and we understand why, but passion, emotion and sentimental attachment to particular services do not always align with the clinical interests of local populations. Patient safety and evidence must come first. I really worry about the introduction of a party political knockabout in that context.”
“I really do understand the hon. Member’s point. She would like to be able to save her services and lobby her colleagues in Government to make those decisions, but—speaking from experience—saving our accident and emergency department was not about using politics or political pressure to change the decision. Public support was really important and we did our fair share of parliamentary petitions, marches and everything we could to keep the pressure up, but in the end it was about the evidence base that we put together to save the department. When it comes to matters of clinical provision and of providing the best services for patients, clinical factors have to be paramount.”
“I associate myself and everyone on the Opposition Benches with the Secretary of State’s remarks and warmly welcome the support that the Government are providing to the people of Ukraine and the Ukrainian army. We all stand with the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom and democracy. Turning to matters closer to home, the Secretary of State asked the Chancellor for £5 billion to cover essential covid costs—ongoing covid costs—and he came away with nothing, so where will the cuts now fall in the NHS budget?”
“Hang on a minute. So one minute the Secretary of State is asking for £5 billion from the Treasury, and the next minute he has found the money within the Department. Either he was trying to pull a fast one on the Treasury, because he had the money he needed, or he has not got the money he wanted and therefore the cuts are going to fall within existing budgets. Members do not need to take my word for it; it was reported in The Times that the Health Secretary threatened that, if he did not get the funding, it would mean delaying investment in social care, fewer elective surgeries and cuts to the hospital building programme. Having, I think, not tried to pull a fast one on the Chancellor, is he now pulling a fast one on patients, and is it not really the patients who are going to pay the price for his failed negotiations?”
“In conclusion, it is not just that the Government did not fix the roof while the sun was shining, they dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards. With the ceiling of their ambition that the Secretary of State outlined today being to go back to where we were before the pandemic, it is now clear that the longer that we give the Conservatives in office, the longer patients will wait.”
“Heart and stroke victims are waiting more than two hours for an ambulance when every minute matters. It is clear from what the Secretary of State said today, from what his colleague, the Minister for Health, the hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), said yesterday, and no doubt what will be heard repeated in the Tory scripts in the days and weeks to come, that the Conservatives are hoping to blame the state of NHS waiting lists on the pandemic—the “covid waiting lists”, they called them. But this is not a covid backlog; it is a Tory backlog. After a decade of Tory mismanagement, the NHS had: record waiting lists of 4.5 million before the pandemic; staff shortages of 100,000 before the pandemic; 17,000 fewer beds before the pandemic; and 112,000 vacancies in social care before the pandemic.”
“Then there is the issue of wider NHS and social care pressures that impact directly on waiting lists and waiting times: the pressures on GP practices that see people ringing the surgery at the crack of dawn in the hope of getting through before the appointments have gone; the pressures on social care that lead to delayed discharges from hospital, as we saw in more than 400,000 cases in November alone; and the missed opportunities and the wasted money that comes from a failure to invest in community services that lead to people turning up at A&E at greater cost to patient health and at greater cost to the taxpayer. This plan falls well short of the challenge facing our country. Six million people are waiting for care. Cancer care is in crisis, with half a million patients with suspected cancer not seen in time.”
“The Secretary of State himself told the Health and Social Care Committee in November that his plan would include a strategy for the workforce crisis. We know the NHS wants a workforce plan and the public want a workforce plan. He promised a workforce plan, so where is it? There is not even a budget for Health Education England let alone a serious plan to recruit and retain the workforce that we need. Instead, he is proposing new NHS reservists. Who are they? Where are they coming from? How many does he imagine there will be? How does he imagine that they will make a dent in the 93,000 vacancies? It seems more “Dad’s Army” than SAS.”
“Putting to one side the appalling spectacle of the Tory leadership crisis impacting on life and death decision making in Government, it seems from the statement that the Chancellor has won the day. What other explanation can there be for a plan to recover the NHS and bring down waiting lists that does not contain a workforce plan? The single biggest challenge facing the NHS is the workforce challenge. There are 93,000 staffing vacancies in the NHS today. The NHS is understaffed, overworked and, if the Secretary of State is not careful, he will lose more people than he is able to recruit. This is not a new development, and it should not be news to him. In April, the NHS called for a national workforce plan. Polling from the Health Foundation found that the public want more staff with fewer workload pressures.”
“The Prime Minister has also announced that three out of four patients should receive a cancer diagnosis within 28 days, but that is an existing target which was introduced in April and has never been met, and nothing that the Secretary of State has announced today gives me any confidence that it will be met in the future. Given that half a million patients with suspected cancer are not being seen in time, it seems that the Secretary of State declared a war on cancer after more than a decade of disarming the NHS, and is now sending the NHS into battle empty-handed. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this is the announcement that the Secretary of State wanted to make. One Government official briefed Robert Peston that the plan was being blocked by the Chancellor, who is, “reluctant to rescue the Prime Minister”.”
“The Secretary of State reaffirmed the Prime Minister’s commitments on cancer, announced only yesterday. He announced a new target that no one should wait more than two months for cancer diagnosis, but there is already a target for the vast majority of cancer patients to be treated within two months of referral. Can he tell us which target he is aiming to meet? Is it the target that has not been hit since 2015, or the target announced yesterday, which seems to lower standards for patients because the Government consistently fail to meet them?”
“The only big new idea seems to be a website that tells people that they are waiting for a long time, as if they did not already know. Perhaps the Secretary of State can tell us whether the plan itself contains two other measures that have been floated in the press: the cancellation of patients’ follow-up appointments, whether they need them or not, and an offer enabling people to seize the opportunity to travel hundreds of miles around the country, if they can find a hospital in England that does not already have a waiting list crisis of its own. What we did hear was a series of reannouncements, including some perfectly sensible proposals for community diagnostic and surgical hubs. We welcome those, but the Secretary of State cannot pretend that they meet the scale of the challenge.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement, but it falls seriously short of the scale of the challenge facing the NHS and the misery that is affecting millions of people stuck on record high NHS waiting lists. We have been waiting some time for his plan to tackle NHS waiting times. We were told that it would arrive before Christmas; we were told that it would arrive yesterday; and it is not clear from his statement today that the delay was worth the wait. There is no plan to tackle the workforce crisis, no plan to deal with delayed discharges, and no hope of eliminating waits of more than a year before the general election in 2024. I wonder whether the Conservatives will be putting that on their election leaflets.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care if he will make a statement on the publication of his Department’s plan for elective care recovery in England.”
“The Prime Minister has also announced that three out of four patients should receive a cancer diagnosis within 28 days, but that is an existing target that was introduced last April and has never been met. The waiting list crisis is the chickens coming home to roost after more than a decade of Tory failure. The Treasury blocked a plan for staffing and it is now blocking the plan to cut waiting times. Is it not now clear, amid the chaos, confusion and spectacular incompetence on display, that the longer we give the Conservatives in government, the longer patients will wait?”
“So it has been left to the Prime Minister to clear things up, which tends to go almost as well as breakfast television with the Culture Secretary. No wonder she has been dispatched to the middle east. Let me turn to the “tough targets” that the Minister mentioned. Today the Prime Minister announced a new target that no one should wait longer than two months for cancer diagnosis, but there is already a target for the vast majority of cancer patients to be treated within two months of referral, and it has not been hit since 2015. Is this not just another example of the Conservatives lowering standards for patients because they consistently fail to meet them?”
“But there is no need to worry, because there is a website coming that will tell people that they are waiting a long time, even if there is no plan to ensure that they do not-. Then there is the “reason” for the delay. Briefings from the Department for Health and Social Care claimed that the Chancellor had blocked the plan. As one Government official said, “it’s pretty obvious it’s about Treasury reluctance to rescue the PM”. Is this where the shambles of the Conservative party is taking us? Is the Chancellor seriously playing political games while 6 million people wait for care? No wonder the Health Secretary has not bothered to show his face this afternoon. He is probably still recovering from the embarrassment of this morning’s media round, where the big announcement was literally that there was no announcement.”
“Thank you for granting the urgent question, Mr Speaker. This is not a covid backlog; it is a Tory backlog. We went into the pandemic with NHS waiting lists already at a record 4.5 million, and now 6 million people are waiting on those lists—more than ever before. More than 1 million are waiting for scans and tests used to diagnose cancer, and the NHS itself is waiting—waiting for the Government’s plan to deal with the backlog. So where is it? It was due to be published today but was pulled last night. It is like something from “The Thick of It”, but the reality is worse than fiction—a photo op without a plan; the Government’s own NHS recovery plan just another cancelled operation.”
“Is not it the case that when this Conservative Government thought no one was watching, they abandoned any pretence of being careful stewards of public finances, bunged millions to their mates and donors, and now working families are footing the bill? What would Mrs Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, whose father instilled in her the value of thrift, make of this lot? Is not the truth that the Conservative party has changed? You cannot trust this Conservative party to show respect to the people or to Parliament. You cannot trust this Conservative Party to keep taxes low. You cannot trust this Conservative Party to spend taxpayers’ money wisely. Indeed, the only thing that has not changed about the Conservatives is the age-old truth that you cannot trust the Tories with the NHS.”
“Of course covid came as a shock, but that does not explain why the Conservative Government ran down Britain’s supply of PPE before the pandemic, leaving us exposed to price hikes and profiteering. Perhaps the Minister can explain why a global pandemic necessarily leads to Conservative party donors and the former Secretary of State’s pub landlord receiving special treatment and hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. It is not just PPE. Why did the Department fail to collect shipments from ports on time, costing taxpayers £111 million in additional fees? Why did the Department fail to pay its bills on time and incur late fees of £1.6 million as a result? Why did the Department spend £250 million on testing materials, ventilators and medical equipment, none of which can be used?”
“We know that many Conservative Members privately—sometimes even publicly—agree with Labour that the national insurance rise is an unfair hit on working families facing a cost of living crisis. How will they explain to their voters that, taken together with the £4.3 billion they handed out to fraudsters, this Government have thrown away more than a year’s receipts of the national insurance rise that they are now imposing on working families? It is not just that the Conservatives are the party of high taxes because they are the party of low growth; they are the party of high taxes because they are the party of waste and incompetence. Think of what the NHS could have done with those funds. It could have reduced waiting lists and waiting times, improved access to GPs and rebuilt hospitals for the 21st century.”
“The Department of Health and Social Care snuck out its annual accounts on the final day on which they were legally required, 10 months after the end of the financial year, and, I am sure by total coincidence, at 5.30 pm on the day Sue Gray published her update. Buried on page 199 was the revelation that the Department lost a staggering £8.7 billion on PPE. That is more than two thirds of the Department’s total spend on PPE written off as losses, double the amount it is spending on the hospital building programme, and almost as much as we spend on the salaries of every nurse in England for an entire year. Why? Because the PPE was unusable, going out of date, and bought in at eye-watering prices because the Government were in a state of desperation having run down our supplies before the pandemic arrived.”
“I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement. But what a disgrace that the Secretary of State did not come to the House today, to account for the inexcusable and unacceptable level of waste in his Department, or when the Department first published the accounts, or two days afterwards, when they were reported on the front pages of several newspapers and on broadcast news. Perhaps the Secretary of State’s silence and absence tell us that he is relaxed about losing billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, or perhaps it is simply that he is too ashamed to show his face. He had to be dragged to the House and when he was, he bottled it and sent his deputy.”
“Perhaps he might stop seeking to turn the pandemic—the greatest threat we have faced to our nation for more than 70 years—into a party political mud fight. Surely we can do better than that, and I would like to think that the Secretary of State and I have been leading by example.”
“We understand the difficulties faced by the Government in coming to today’s decision, and we will continue to be as constructive and helpful as we can be in a national crisis, just as Labour has been throughout the past two years. I welcome very much what the Secretary of State said this afternoon about welcoming Labour support for this policy, and indeed about our wider support for the vaccination roll-out, but let me end on a point of criticism, which is not in any way levelled at the Secretary of State. Given the way that the Labour party has handled its approach to the pandemic response, and the constructive way that we sought to work with the Government, it is not unreasonable to expect the Prime Minister, and others in his party, to stop pretending that that has not been the case.”