§ 10.10 p.m.
§ Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles (Winchester)On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The early finishing of business today seems to present an opportunity for hon. Members to raise other subjects on the Adjournment. I know that this should not be done unless the Minister is prepared to listen and make a brief reply. I wonder whether the Minister who has just replied to the previous debate would be prepared to do this if I raised the subject of a hospital in Winchester?
§ The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security (Mr. Alfred Morris)I had only a few minutes' notice of the hon. and gallant Member's intention to raise this matter. If he wishes to make points about the hospital in Winchester, I have no doubt the House will listen, but he will not expect me to make a considered reply. I would not wish to prevent any hon. Member raising a matter of importance to him self if parliamentary time is available. The hon. and gallant Member will appreciate, however, that since we have had no notice of the debate I cannot be expected to give the kind of reply my Department would have wanted to give if we had been given notice.
§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Oscar Murton)According to "Erskine May", due notice must be given to a Minister, and it is normal to deprecate the occasions when notice has not been given. However, in view of what the Minister has said, if he is willing to listen to the hon. and gallant Member, the Chair is quite in order in allowing this to happen.
§ Rear-Admiral Morgan-GilesThank you for your ruling, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am extremely grateful to the Minister for listening to this short debate about the Royal Hampshire Hospital, in Winchester. I quite understand that he will not be able to give me a full and considered reply, and I am fortunate that this is a subject which is the concern of his Department, though not of him personally. I shall be extremely brief, because I have no wish to keep the staff of the House very long. I know they have had a tremendous bashing in the middle watches on recent nights.
I had hoped to raise this subject in the debate on Monday, but I was unable to catch Mr. Speaker's eye. The main hospital building in Winchester is more than 100 years old and the hutted wards were built for the large number of casualties expected on D-Day in 1944. I have a long report, which sets out the situation in the hospital and says that the overcrowding is so bad and that beds are so close together in some wards that apparatus needed to deal with urgently sick cases will not fit between the beds. If there is a sudden emergency, beds have to be shifted to allow the apparatus to be moved in. In the intensive care ward, which is a very important department of any hospital, doctors have to interview relatives of urgently sick patients in the corridors, amid the hustle and bustle of ordinary hospital life.
I have a photograph here, a copy of which has already been forwarded to the Department, showing a ceiling which had fallen down in a patients' waiting room and admission office which, fortunately, was empty at the time. The main point is that when conditions like this exist in our hospitals the Government must be hard put to justify their decision not to continue the system which provides £40 million in fees each year from pay beds.
On the wider issues affecting this hospital, the doctors are worried about their pay. Everyone worries about pay in these 1727 days of inflation, but the doctors are more worried about their conditions in the hospital, and about their clinical freedom. They have been telling me that if pay beds are abolished and private patients have to go to other hospitals, even if the doctors retain their clinical freedom to treat the private patients they will be spending all their valuable time in traffic jams rather than at the bedsides of their patients.
One of the senior consultants in Winchester told me that Government policy was sheer politics, and to hell with sickness. I wondered whether he might be over-excited, but after giving the matter some thought, I came to the conclusion that he was right. Taxpayers who belong to non-contributory schemes now find that they have been assessed on the contributions paid on their behalf by their employers under legislation introduced by the Chancellor in his Budget earlier this year. This is a deplorable indication of the politics overlying this matter.
I would have liked to ask the Secretary of State for her view on the recent Press reports that the leaders of the National Association of Local Government Officers had been advising their members to object to planning applications, for instance, to turn country houses into nursing homes. I know that the Minister cannot answer these points tonight, but I hope that he will draw his right hon. Friend's attention to the debate so that I may have an answer from her.
We are told that we should attack the measures and not the men—or, in this 1728 case, woman—and I pay heed to that wise maxim. It is, however, a tragedy that in the very difficult circumstances of the National Health Service, and in the considerable economic problems which face it, the doctors should feel that they have nobody to go to. They have no confidence in the Secretary of State, to whom they should be able to turn.
§ 10.18 p.m.
§ The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Security (Mr. Alfred Morris)I shall draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to the points which have been raised by the hon. and gallant Member for Winchester (Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles). Had my hon. Friend the Minister of State known about the debate he would certainly have wanted to be here. In those circumstances, the hon. and gallant Gentleman would have had a very full reply. I assure him that he will receive, at the earliest opportunity, a letter from my Department dealing with the points he raised. There is very little that I can say at the moment, except that I know that the hon. and gallant Gentleman would be the first to appreciate that it is impossible to reply to points of detail at such short notice. I am glad that he has been able to speak on a matter which is clearly of great constituency importance to him.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at nineteen minutes past Ten o'clock.