HC Deb 19 October 1999 vol 336 cc249-50
12. Mr. Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley)

How many casualty modernisation schemes are planned to improve security for staff. [92595]

The Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Alan Milburn)

Of the 171 schemes currently under way to modernise and expand accident and emergency departments, 55 are concerned specifically with improvements to security for staff and patients. The other 116 schemes are more general and will also benefit hospital staff.

Mr. Campbell

First, may I welcome my north-east colleague to his new post? His statement that he will save the lives of cancer and heart patients should have been made from the beginning. I am beginning to warm to new Labour—[Interruption.] Before my colleagues get too excited, I am only saying warm.

I appreciate what my right hon. Friend plans to do about casualties. It is hypocritical of the Tories to say that they will do all that they claim while cutting taxes at the same time. I cannot understand how they mean to do both.

Mr. Milburn

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to level that charge against the Opposition. Their agenda is very different from ours. The hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) clearly laid out the Conservative agenda when he told a fringe meeting at his party conference that he was an "unreconstructed Thatcherite free marketeer" and a "great believer energetically" in markets. He told his audience: The biggest problem that we have in the NHS is that it is not a proper market. The hon. Gentleman went on to set out the real agenda behind the Conservative party's patients guarantee, saying: what we are proposing could revolutionise private insurance in the way we revolutionised pensions in the 1980s. We all remember pensions misselling. The patients guarantee was, the hon. Gentleman said, a Trojan horse, and so it is. The Tories would privatise the national health service; we will modernise it.