§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn—[Paul Clark.]
6.37 pm§ Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead) (Lab/Co-op)I have only one theme under the debate title of "Hemel Hempstead Hospital". I want the Minister to require some sums to be done by the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire strategic health authority. It has refused to do any sums and in my view it threatens health services in its area with a huge debt for the next four decades.
I thank the Dacorum hospital action group, which is in no less than its 29th year of campaigning on the matter. During my seven years as an MP, I have delivered 88,000 signatures to Health Ministers, to Downing street and to others in defense of Hemel Hempstead hospital, yet there is still a strong sense that a desperately bad, wasteful and what I call nugatory decision is about to be taken. By that I mean that the decision will not benefit Hertfordshire and will not lead to the dispersion of services.
The context of the debate is the desperately bad state of the Hertfordshire acute health system. I have called it a black hole because it is the only population of 1 million that I have been able to find that has no tertiary acute services to support it. There are four acute hospitals, of which three are in a state of acute decay. It is estimated that it will cost £90 million to repair Princess Alexandra tower at Watford, and £90 million to repair the main tower at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Welwyn Garden City. There has been a quotation of £50 million for the Lister hospital in Stevenage. Only Hemel Hempstead hospital is in a passable condition and that follows the closure of St. Albans acute services in the early 1990s.
The desperate condition of the service is reflected in the desperate condition of mental health services, with four large mental health hospitals closed during the Thatcher era. Our system has operated at a chronic loss for decades, so every time we need anything done, people say, "Sorry, we cannot do it. There's no money." The system has been divisive; those in Hertfordshire who are wealthy can go to London, but the poorer get treated in second-rate hospitals that cannot give the full range of services in Hertfordshire.
That could change. The Government have offered a way forward, with funding that will make the system free of debt and with some tertiary acute services provided locally. The Varley report on cancer said that there should be a location of such services in Hertfordshire and the Government have indicated that they are prepared to finance that move. That is fantastically good news for Hertfordshire and I thank the Minister and his Department for the response that they have made to the recommendations in that report.
For three decades, there has been a desire for two things from the administrators of health in Hertfordshire. First, there is a desire for what is called a super-hospital—a single hospital with acute services, governing the whole population of Hertfordshire. That is a stupid suggestion because Hertfordshire is a series of relatively small market towns with relatively poor 752 transport links between the various bits of the county. We need a distributed hospital system, not a concentrated one. With those suggestions, there has always been a suggestion of marginalising Hemel Hempstead hospital, despite the fact that it is in the most populated part of the county and, indeed, the eastern region.
We had a review recently. Those involved called it a consultation; we called it an absolute stitch-up. There were two options in the consultation but both involved significant service closures at two of our four hospitals. The first option was to prefer Hemel Hempstead hospital and Stevenage but to shut trauma facilities at Welwyn Garden City and Watford; there was a tick for Hemel and Stevenage under that option. The other option was to close trauma facilities at Hemel and Stevenage and improve them at Watford, while inaugurating a new hospital in Hatfield after shutting down the mouldering Welwyn Garden City hospital. There is a strong demand in most communities for new hospitals and mine is no exception, so option two—the new hospital in Hatfield—was favoured.
The costs were never properly examined, despite a claim by my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Mr. Pollard) at a recent meeting that all the sums had been done. I speak as a mathematics graduate and say that none of the sums has been done. Throughout the consultation, there was a strong feeling that an agreement for a £500 million private finance initiative could be gained from the Government, so a new hospital at Hatfield and the demolition of the present hospital at Welwyn Garden City were given active consideration. While we are about it, it was thought, why not bung the new cancer centre in Hatfield, even though it is not even in the current Mount Vernon cancer network area? Why not, by the way, also develop a new medical school—but that was not factored in. That was the strong feeling in the community.
The deadline for the end of the consultation was early September, but it became clear at the beginning of August—when I made a 20-page submission to the strategic health authority—that although we heard that trauma facilities at Hatfield and Watford were to be developed, only £27 million had been allocated to Watford for improvements. That would not even repair the plumbing. Watford is in as dreadful a state as the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Welwyn, which the strategic health authority proposed to demolish.
On 28 August, a mere five days before the consultation was due to end, it was realised that if that part of the plan was kept to, Watford would pull out, recognising that it, too, was going to lose its facilities in a major way. On that day, a document—a "clarification"—was issued, which I have before me. It strengthened option 2 by what I can only describe as fairy godmother economics: let money pour out of the sky, and as a result not only build a £500 million hospital in Hatfield but, it seemed to suggest, provide a similarly scaled scheme at Watford. Incidentally, the Hatfield initiative would be the largest health private finance initiative ever, overtaking the University College hospital, which cost £422 million. But the Watford scheme was never costed or admitted to; mutterings were simply made to the effect that "whatever it took" would be provided.
753 I have since found out in a recent meeting with the chair of the West Herts Hospitals NHS trust that every single building at Watford may well have to be demolished and replaced. Thus we have not just a massive,£500 million project, which is what the consultation was said to be about, but a project twice that scale, involving demolishing and replacing two hospitals. We have not a £500 million project for two new trauma centres, but a £1 billion project for two new hospitals in Hertfordshire. That is the current suggestion of the strategic health authority.
I am afraid to say that in my view, the strategic health authority has severely misled the public. It released the figures on Watford only after I made my submission, in which I pointed out that its plans were incompetent. All that it did was simply to adopt the fairy godmother option: spend, spend, spend, regardless of the constraints that any responsible Government body should have. That is why I ask that the sums be done.
I do not actually believe that the result of those activities will be a series of new super-hospitals. The strategic health authority's plans are so absurd, costly and damaging that the laudable plan of addressing the problems of the Hertfordshire NHS by developing new tertiary services, along the lines of the Varley report, will be lost as well.
Everyone is in favour of fairy godmother economics—if they are to receive benefits. At a recent vote, the strategic health authority approved this wonderful plan by 10 votes to one. Personally, I would not have voted for either of its rotten options. Option 1, which people said would benefit Hemel hospital, was based on a wonderful premise that most did not spot. The strategic health authority arrived at the idea that the options would not be that different in cost. How could it have done so, given that the only hospital in Hertfordshire with a decent estate is Hemel? Everyone admits that it is in much better condition than the other three hospitals. The strategic health authority said, "Actually, putting the cancer centre at Hemel hospital, which everyone agrees is decidedly possible, will cost £95 million." That is not exactly chicken-feed, bearing in mind that Dartford hospital cost £94 million. We were pleased that that was possible, but the strategic health authority said, "If we're going to put the centre there, you've got to knock down the rest of the hospital, leaving only the Verulam wing standing."
What a pernicious, even vicious, premise on which to base a consultation! We repudiate and reject the idea that a hospital that has recently been given £4.2 million of investment—icluding a superb new facility that allows excellent communication between accident and emergency and the fracture clinic, and a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner—should be knocked down, just so that the strategic health authority can make it seem as though it is faced with two options of similar cost.
Hemel Hempstead happens to he at the geographical centre of the Mount Vernon cancer network area. The new cancer centre could be developed on the so-called Paradise site, which is in public ownership—it is owned by English Partnerships—and can be offered to the NHS as a massive development site, at agricultural prices, in a town centre in Hertfordshire. What a phenomenal boon that would be to the NHS budget. I 754 have arranged that deal myself, so I know that it is binding on English Partnerships, which has development land elsewhere in exchange.
Dacorum council also wants hospital consolidation, and has offered an additional site for accommodation for nurses and other hospital staff. Hemel Hempstead hospital has the capacity to quadruple its present size and still have adequate facilities for a whole range of developments. It also has wonderful access to the M1, the M25 and the A41, and, because it is in a town centre, fantastically good bus links with a wide variety of locations, many of which are a long way from Hertfordshire.
For £200 million, the whole Hertfordshire hospital system could be revivified, and most of the remaining £105 million could be spent not at Hemel Hempstead hospital, which does not need that much, but in the rest of the system, which is crumbling, derelict in places and desperately neglected. We might then be able to negate the accurate perception that Hertfordshire is not in the forefront of NHS acute services development.
I do not expect the Minister to announce now that he is in favour of one way of improving the health service in Hertfordshire rather than another. I have known him too well and for too long to think that such an answer would be forthcoming. All I want him to do is to ensure that the sums are done, because we are talking about the difference between £1 billion and £200 million. It will be a scandal if people get away with knocking down new productive NHS plant and putting the same facilities up elsewhere, at massive cost to the taxpayer and the NHS.
I ask the Minister to direct that any business plan for the development of acute services in Hertfordshire carefully considers the prospect of improving services by developing the cancer centre at Hemel Hempstead, which is in the middle of the cancer network area. The taxpayers of Hertfordshire support the Government's plans to improve the NHS in the county, but they do not want their system saddled with chronic debt for the next 40 years, and they want some resources left for primary care and mental health. Any numerate person must know how absurd are the ill-considered, late breaking. support-brokering plans of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire strategic health authority.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr. Stephen Ladyman)I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter) on securing this Adjournment debate. He is a doughty fighter for his constituents; he has been fighting this battle for some time with vigour and determination, and I suspect that whatever I say tonight will not change that by one iota. He will continue to fight for his constituents, and they should be proud of him and grateful to him for his efforts on their behalf.
In case I run out of time at the end of the debate, I shall start by saying that my hon. Friend is right: Ministers do not use Adjournment debates to change local health policies. Local health priorities and the planning of local health services have been devolved to local areas, under our plans to shift the balance of power away from Whitehall, so I am not in any position to direct in one way or the other. Until such time as certain criteria are met and the Department of Health is asked 755 to intervene, I have no powers to order any such things. What I can do is ensure that my hon. Friend's words are read carefully by those who are in a position to take a decision in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, that they reflect on them, and that they take account of his views. I shall certainly do that
I can give my hon. Friend a further reassurance that the next stage of the process is to produce business plans, which will be worked up for both options. It is not true to say that they will both be worked up in the same detail, but they will both be worked further to a certain point. A decision will then be taken and the preferred option will be worked up in even greater detail. I can assure my hon. Friend that his concerns about the sums adding up and the relative costs of the proposals will be aired during that process, so he will continue to have opportunities to express his views if his constituents are still dissatisfied by the decisions.
I shall say more about the local decisions in a few moments, but it is important to state for the record that the NHS cannot stand still. It has to change if we are to improve it. The health care system is under pressure. Patients are still waiting too long for their operations—despite the dramatic fall in waiting times that has been announced this week, which is surely welcomed by everyone—and many hospitals are still in a poor state and need updating. We also need to recruit and retain more doctors and nurses. We have not only to increase capacity, but to raise clinical standards generally. It is not just more of the same that we need in the health service, but a radical re-look at how services are provided.
The NHS plan set out a challenging 10-year programme for NHS reform. Far-reaching changes are often necessary to provide the best possible services for patients. We must ensure that services are accessible and flexible, and we want to design services around the needs of patients. As part of the modernisation programme, many NHS economies and organisations are considering, with their local stakeholders, changes to the way in which they organise their services. I believe that we all recognise that hospital services need to change if we are to continue to fulfil patients' needs and improve access.
Services cannot remain static for ever, but have to be responsive to local needs and changing clinical practice. There are, of course, several different pressures on the service, and providers of health services have a responsibility to live within their means. Those issues and many others need to be taken into consideration in planning changes to services.
As I said earlier, it is our policy, within the framework set out in the NHS plan and the "Shifting the Balance of Power within the NHS" initiative, to devolve funding decisions to the front line. It is now for primary care trusts, in partnership with strategic health authorities and other local stakeholders, to determine how best to use their funds to meet national and local priorities for improving health, tackling health inequalities and modernising services. They are in the best position to do that because of the specialist knowledge they have of the local community. That is why Ministers no longer have the power to direct local services in quite the way that my hon. Friend requested of me at the end of his speech.
756 I believe that my hon. Friend will agree that within Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, some health services—particularly the major hospitals in Hertfordshire: the Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Lister and Queen Elizabeth II hospitals—do not represent the standard of care and treatment that we expect to see in the 21st century. Indeed, I recently visited the four acute trusts in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire and saw for myself the services and fabric of those environments. That is why the NHS in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire undertook an extremely comprehensive and far-reaching consultation—a two-year process, reviewing a number of services and taking into account future trends in health care, national policy and best practice from around the country.
The formal document "Investing in Your Health" and its associated consultation ran from 3 March to 1 September 2003, having been extended to allow for a parallel consultation on cancer services in north London, run by the North-West London strategic health authority.
During the consultation period two options for the future reconfiguration of hospital services were proposed; both entailed retaining six major hospitals in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, including Hemel Hempstead and Watford general hospitals. Under option 1, Hemel Hempstead would be a major acute hospital caring for people requiring emergency treatment. Under option 2, Hemel Hempstead would treat out-patients and people requiring planned operations and medical procedures, although accident and emergency services would still be retained.
The overwhelming preference after the consultation process was for option 2, which proposes developing five of the existing hospitals in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire and building a new state-of-the-art hospital in Hatfield to replace the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Welwyn Garden City and provide a new cancer centre. I assure my hon. Friend that I have been given an assurance that "Investing in Your Health" went through two scrutiny processes locally, both of which confirmed that people are happy with the process and the outcome. In addition, a joint scrutiny process followed in relation to cancer services specifically. It is expected that the final meeting will take place this month.
I am aware that option 2 was not the option of choice for my hon. Friend and his constituents, but I am sure he will agree that the important thing is to focus on health outcomes for everybody. The proposed new model of care will mean more resources going towards caring for people closer to home and in community settings. A cancer centre will be located in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire so that patients do not have to travel outside the two counties for treatment. The quality of health care will be improved by allowing hospitals to specialise in certain fields of medicine to create local centres of excellence, and by moving planned surgery to dedicated "surgicentres".
I assure my hon. Friend that if, at the end of the process, option 2 is confirmed as a way forward, Hemel Hempstead hospital will continue to have a future. I am informed that it will receive capital investment of about £25 million for its development into a modern, high-quality, major hospital, specialising in planned surgery. Indeed, when I visited the hospital in October I saw for 757 myself where some investment has already been delivered; for example, there is state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging, and a fracture clinic and dermatology treatment centre opened their doors to patients at Hemel Hempstead general hospital in March. That investment in new clinics means that patients and staff have a new treatment area. The final phase of the project, the construction of a new X-ray reception area, opened at the end of July. The Hemel birth centre opened on 31 March. It is a self-contained unit run by midwives, offering a supportive, "home from home" environment in which mothers can give birth.
I can also reassure my hon. Friend that under the proposed option 2, the hospital's accident and emergency department would remain open, although patients with serious or life-threatening conditions would be taken to larger trauma centres at Watford, Luton or Dunstable hospitals.
My hon. Friend has expressed concerns about the cost of option 2, but I am assured that the health authority employed a firm of consultants who carried out an assessment of the financial implications of the overall affordability of the proposal for the health care system of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. That report, which is in the public domain, demonstrated that from projected total revenue in excess of £2 billion, the cost differential between the two options was about £10 million, or about 0.5 per cent. It also means that under option 2 more patients will be treated locally rather than large numbers of patients having to travel outside their health area.
I share my hon. Friend's concerns about access to the hospital, but I understand that English Partnerships is working with West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS trust to develop a comprehensive development strategy that could deliver about 130 key-worker homes on land adjoining Hemel Hempstead hospital.
As I mentioned earlier, it is our policy that primary care trusts, in partnership with other local NHS trusts and the strategic health authority, decide the priorities 758 for the NHS locally. That is where specific local knowledge and expertise lies, and it is not appropriate for Ministers to decide on the direction of travel or how services should be configured—we have made that clear. It is right that the local NHS should do that.
There is still a great deal of work to be done on the development of business cases and plans before the Secretary of State gives his final seal of approval. The next stage involves producing a more detailed analysis of the proposals. A strategic outline case must be written and it must meet four criteria before it can be approved. The plans must be affordable, achievable and accessible, with proper human resources.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead will understand that it would not be appropriate for me to comment further on this matter in case, following the local process, that would pre-empt any future ministerial decision that may be necessary. However, I assure him that the Department, and Ministers, will continue to work with the local NHS to review the progress of the local economy, and to ensure that the difficulties that are faced remain manageable.
I hope, therefore, that my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead, who introduced this important debate and who continues to work with the local NHS to build a better future for the residents in the area, will accept my assurance that the sums that he said were needed will be provided. The process will continue, and I know that local health managers will welcome further discussions with him and his constituents. Some people in the local health economy may still have to face difficult decisions, but I hope that we can all agree that what will emerge from the discussions and the change of configuration will be better for everyone, and better for the health of all the people living in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at five minutes past Seven o'clock.