Primary Health Care (Hansard, 24 June 1997)

§ 11. Ms Perham
To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement about his plans for improving primary health care. [3476]

§ Madam Speaker
I have called Question 11.

Hon. Members
Come on!

§ Mr. Dobson
I thought that I could have a bit of a rest, Madam Speaker. Primary care services are the first contact that most patients have with the national health service. Up and down the country, there are innumerable examples of very high quality services being provided by dedicated primary care professionals. The Government are determined to build on the achievements of those professionals, encouraging excellence and innovation and helping all practices to attain the standards of the best.
We have begun to release primary care from the bureaucratic excesses of the internal market and we are working to ensure that non-fundholding practices and their patients are no longer at a disadvantage.

§ Ms Perham
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the waste of money on bureaucracy and the state of the health service were the issues that most concerned people in I1ford, North during the election campaign? My right hon. Friend touched on prescription fraud in his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner). I understand that it costs about £100 million a year, which means that each health authority could spend an extra £1 million on 145 heart by-pass operations or even 222 hip replacements. That scale of deception was allowed to go on by the Conservative party. How does my right hon. Friend intend to tackle the scandal?

§ Mr. Dobson
The first point to make is that the vast majority of patients, doctors and pharmacists are decent and honest and have had nothing to do with the scandalous level of prescription fraud. However, there are a limited number of villains among all three categories and we are determined that they will be stopped. One of the problems—this is another matter for our general review of the NHS—is that the system as operated at present is scandalously open to fraud. We have to make it less open to fraud, while not imposing additional bureaucratic burdens or making life difficult for patients who have to deal with their doctor and pharmacist.

§ Mr. Maples
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, one of the things that are useful in planning the future of primary health care is to know the future of funding levels. In the past 18 years, spending in the NHS has risen in real terms by an average of 3.1 per cent. a year. Can the right hon. Gentleman commit himself to matching that performance over the lifetime of this Parliament?

§ Mr. Dobson
We are committed in our manifesto to a real increase—

§ Mr. Maples
Three per cent.

§ Mr. Dobson
The hon. Gentleman apparently wants to give the answers as well as ask the questions. That would be more understandable if he had shifted straight from one side of the House to the other, but he has had a five-year interval before doing so. I repeat that, in our election manifesto, we said that there would be an increase in real terms every year under the Labour Government.