Waiting Lists (Hansard, 28 April 1998)

§ 10. Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham)
When he expects waiting lists will be reduced by 100,000 from the 1 May 1997 levels. [38682]

§ The Secretary of State for Health
As I made clear on 18 March, we are committed to reducing waiting lists to 100,000 below the record levels we inherited by the end of this Parliament.

§ Dr. Cable
I thank the Secretary of State for his reply. Can he give an assurance that, following the welcome additional money now being used to reduce waiting lists, there will be no further cases of the sort reported to us as constituency Members of Parliament, wherein clinicians have been leaned on by administrators to distort their medical priorities in order to treat politically more embarrassing 18-month waiting list cases?

§ Mr. Dobson
I would not have thought that any clinician worth his or her salt would allow themselves to 138 be leaned on. If they allowed their judgment to be clouded in that way, that was their fault and they must answer to their conscience, their profession and their patients.

§ Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock)
As part of the strategy to bring down hospital waiting lists, will the Secretary of State consider approaching the South Essex health authority and Basildon and Thurrock General Hospitals NHS trust to find out whether the spare capacity in wards at Orsett hospital can be used not only for my own area of Basildon and Thurrock, but for the wider regional need to reduce hospital waiting lists?

§ Mr. Dobson
I do not pretend to be an expert on every hospital in the country, and I am sure that those in charge in that area, having had it made clear to them by me that they are to get their waiting lists down, will take every sensible step to get them down. In this case, they will be assisted by the £3.8 million that is going into my hon. Friend's area, which takes the total extra money that we have put in to £18.5 million over and above what the Tories intended.

§ Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge)
Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that, in its document "Labour's Early Pledges" and, indeed, in the general election manifesto, the Labour party promised immediate action to reduce waiting lists by 100,000? Is it not a fact that, 12 months on, waiting lists have actually increased by 100,000? Although no one doubts the sincerity of the right hon. Gentleman's commitment to the national health service, is not the truth of the matter that, in the general election campaign, the Labour party made promises about waiting lists that it knew it could not possibly keep, because it did not want political honesty to get in the way of a successful electoral outcome?
Would not the people of this country be better served if, instead of casual ad hoc sums being offered up as a fig leaf to spare the Secretary of State's embarrassment, the right hon. Gentleman came to the House today and pledged that the Government would ensure that their annual increases were at least as great as those of the previous Conservative Government? That would be an announcement worth hearing.

§ Mr. Dobson
Talking about casual promises, we could reasonably interpret the hon. Gentleman's remarks as a rejection by their elected representative of the £6 million extra that is going to the two health authorities serving his constituents. The casual ad hoc sums to which he refers are apparently of no consequence to the hon. Gentleman, but I am sure that many of my hon. Friends would welcome them being spent in their area. We are serious about getting waiting lists down. The people of this country are sick to death of waiting lists, year in, year out. It is not the fault of the people working in the health service, but the fault of successive Governments. We have to bring waiting lists down and we are going to bring them down.

§ Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)
Instead of wasting too much time listening to hypocritical claptrap from the Tories—they had their chance and they blew it—will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that he probably has the biggest nut to crack in getting down waiting lists, and that £500 million was set aside for contingencies in the Budget 139 a few weeks ago? Will he consistently remind the Chancellor of the Exchequer that we need to keep the promise to get waiting lists down, and that it will need a lot of money? A lot rests on it, so let us make sure that we get our hands on all the cash available to do it.

§ Mr. Dobson
My hon. Friend knows that both he and I set a great deal of store by propriety. He knows that I have discussions with the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, and that it would be wrong for me to disclose their contents, but we have been successful in obtaining an extra £500 million to be spent on reducing waiting lists this year, and I expect that sufficient sums will be forthcoming to reduce them by 100,000 or more before the end of this Parliament.
I remind those Conservative Members who seem to think that their stewardship of the national health service was popular of the statement made by the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), now the principal Tory spokesman on the health service, who, as recently as 22 September 1997, said: