HC Deb 26 March 2002 vol 382 cc687-8
2. Helen Jones (Warrington, North)

What steps he is taking to improve health care for those living in deprived areas. [43716]

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

Extra resources and staff are being provided in many deprived areas. Alongside that, there is a better focus on preventing ill health rather than just on treating it.

Helen Jones

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that reply. Within Warrington's boundaries are examples of precisely the sort of health inequalities that the Government are tackling. What assurances can he give me that, when it is set up, the new Warrington primary care trust will direct extra resources to those health deprived areas of my constituency? What monitoring arrangements will the Government put in place to check that that is happening and to ensure that we get the outcomes we want?

Mr. Milburn

My hon. Friend is right about her constituency-of course she is; she probably knows it better than I do, although I have visited it on occasion.

David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire)

It's by the sea, you know.

Mr. Milburn

My hon. Friend is being helpful, as he sometimes is.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, North (Helen Jones) is well aware that there is in her area a problem of health inequalities. That problem is the reason why extra money has been made available through the health inequalities adjustment.

Primary health care trusts, which are to come online in factors from next week, provide a better opportunity to focus on public health and health inequalities than the previous structures, which were to some extent distant from the local communities they were intended to serve. Health authorities are somewhat at a distance, whereas PCTs will be much more local and will be able to forge closer working relationships with local authorities, local businesses, voluntary sector providers and others precisely to deal with the problems my hon. Friend identifies. We will take care to ensure that PCTs do not merely commission good services, but do all within their power to ensure that health inequalities, which are a problem in her part of the world and mine, are dealt with properly.

Mr. George Osborne (Tatton)

How will health inequalities be tackled by the massive bureaucratic reorganisation currently taking place within the health service? My constituency faces a new mental health trust, a new primary care trust and a new strategic health authority-all at the same time. There is concern in Cheshire, for example, that being lumped in with Merseyside, which has very different health needs, will result in different health inequalities not being properly dealt with by the new bureaucracy.

Mr. Milburn

I do not think that there will be more bureaucracy-far from it. In fact, we have taken money out of the bureaucracy that was, as the hon. Gentleman well remembers, introduced under the Conservatives' internal market, of which he is a passionate supporter but which has now gone from the national health service. The Conservatives constantly urge the Government to be less centralising and less interventionist and to ensure that our health service is built more from the bottom up than from the top down, and that is precisely what the new primary care trusts are designed to achieve. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will reflect on his remarks and, for once, learn something.

Mr. Neil Turner (Wigan)

I welcome the 50 per cent. real-terms increase in health funding that we in Wigan have received since 1997. However, more than 20 of the 24 wards in the borough of Wigan are in the worst 20 per cent. of this country's wards in terms of health. Unfortunately, when the weighting is applied, the current formula reduces the amount of money we get. That works against the Government's plans to sort out both health inequalities and social exclusion. Is my right hon. Friend going to make progress on creating a new formula that recognises real health needs and ensures that PCTs get the funding they require to tackle those needs?

Mr. Milburn

Yes, that is precisely what we want to do. Two things have happened, the first of which is that we made some interim changes to the formula for distributing NHS cash to local health authorities. We introduced the health inequalities adjustment, which is about £130 million this financial year, and is £148 million next financial year, starting 1 April. That is designed to recognise the particular problems faced by deprived communities in many parts of the country in dealing with ill health and some of its root causes.

Secondly, we are now in the process of reviewing the whole way in which NHS cash is distributed to local communities. In future, it will be important to ensure that health cash goes to those areas with the greatest health need. That is right and it is part and parcel of what we need to do generally in our country: of course we must improve the health of the population overall, but as a Government and as a nation we legitimately have the objective of securing faster improvements in health among the poorest people in our society.