HC Deb 16 October 2001 vol 372 cc1043-5
9. Mr. David Cameron (Witney)

What plans he has to safeguard and expand cottage and community hospitals. [3772]

The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr. John Hutton)

Community and cottage hospitals play an important role within the national health service. They provide an essential service to patients, especially in the recuperative phases of recovery from illness or accident, and will help us to meet the target of introducing an additional 5,000 intermediate care beds by 2004.

Mr. Cameron

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that answer. He may recall that the Burford hospital in my constituency was closed during the last Parliament. Is he aware that a local body called the Phoenix project has raised money to buy the building and provide a range of services and clinics to promote healthy living, which is exactly in line with Government policy? Will he encourage the local primary care trust to get on and sell the building to the Phoenix trust so that that can go ahead? I know that he may not have all the details but time is running out; it is urgent and I should really welcome his intervention in this matter. We want to save our local health centre.

Mr. Hutton

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on raising that point and of course I am more than happy to look into the issues that he has raised.

Lawrie Quinn (Scarborough and Whitby)

I welcome the introduction of the new primary care trust for my area of North Yorkshire. For the first time in probably a decade or more, the Whitby community hospital feels that it has a future—that it has a role to play in undertaking proper health care for people in the Whitby and North York moors area of my county. Will the Minister take every opportunity to make sure that the people who live in the remoter, rural parts of the county of North Yorkshire get better access to community hospitals such as the Whitby community hospital and that the full intentions of the primary care trust idea can be brought to the forefront?

Mr. Hutton

I am grateful to my hon. Friend—I have had the pleasure of visiting Scarborough with him and seeing some of the improvements in the NHS in relation to the care of the elderly that have taken place there; they are very long overdue. Older people are the largest users of health care services in this country, and it is very important for us to continue to improve the range of care services available to them. My hon. Friend raises a particularly important issue about access to those services in rural communities, but that is precisely the reason why we set up primary care trusts: they can assess those needs and ensure that the necessary arrangements are put in place so that older people can gain access to the wider range of health care services that we are committed to establishing.

Mr. Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire)

Does the Minister agree that cottage and community hospitals are more vital than ever as places of convalescence, given the huge increase in the number of elderly people—680,000 this year—who are in hospital beds because they have nowhere else to go? This morning, the Prime Minister spoke of the problem of bed blocking, but is it not a fact that 50,000 care beds have been lost in the past five years due to Government policy? Will the Minister now apologise for the misery and distress caused to so many elderly people? Will he tell us when that trend will end, so that we can see a picture for the future in which the number of care beds does not decline year after year?

Mr. Hutton

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his new responsibilities and hope that in future he will do his homework a little more thoroughly than he has done today. He complains about the lack of beds in the NHS, so I shall remind him who cut the number of beds in the NHS.

Mr. Heald

You did.

Mr. Hutton

No, the Conservative party did. Under the Conservative Government, 60,000 beds were lost in the NHS, and the hon. Gentleman is quite wrong—[Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker

Order. The hon. Gentleman should not shout at anyone, but especially not at the Minister.

Mr. Hutton

I apologise to the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends if I have excited them. They do not like the truth, and the truth is that 50,000 beds have not been lost in the care homes sector. The hon. Gentleman is quite wrong about that. Of course, we have recently announced a substantial additional investment in the NHS and local authorities to ensure that the provision of care for older people is right. I am afraid that it ill behoves the hon. Gentleman, given his new responsibilities, to lecture the Government about a lack of funding, given that he would not even match our social services funding during the previous Parliament.

Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich)

Is my right hon. Friend aware that bed blocking is the direct result of the closure of community and cottage hospitals and, indeed, that it is nonsense to suggest moving people to private sector hospitals, such as those run by Westminster Care, which was exposed at the weekend as doing a very bad job, while we allow the closure of NHS beds and the movement of NHS staff to the private sector? I hope that he will resist that very actively and clearly in the future.

Mr. Hutton

We need to ensure that a range of provision is available for older people, and I can tell my hon. Friend that there are almost 2,500 additional NHS intermediate care beds in England over and above the figure that existed in 1999. What is really important in this context is that older people, as well as other patients in the NHS, get access to the best available care. If we can use and commission appropriate care services at the highest level in the private sector, we fully intend to do so.