Charles Walker tells MPs of his concerns at cuts to healthcare services in Hertfordshire. He especially highlights cuts to services provided by health visitors and reduced services for alcohol abuse and early-stage mental health illnesses.

5.22 pm

Mr. Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to wrap up the Back-Bench contributions in this extremely good debate. I have very much enjoyed sitting through it.

The press lobby called me amiable and chubby. I cannot do much about being amiable, but I decided to do something about being chubby. I went on a diet and now hope that I can keep the weight off. However, I shall not bore the House with my eating habits. I want to stay within the boundaries of a public health debate. If I do not, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure that you will rule me out of order. I want to link my comments to the cuts in the Hertfordshire health economy. The £50 million savings that we are being asked to make over the next two years will have a fundamental impact on public health provision across the county and in my constituency.

We cannot fail to mention per head funding for health. In Hertfordshire it is £900 per head; in the constituency of the Secretary of State for Health it is £1,300 per head, and in parts of Scotland it can be as high as £1,800 per head. There may be very good reasons for those discrepancies, and this is not the place to argue the pros and cons. However, at a time when our acute services and public health services are being cut, the discrepancies are causing my constituents and the residents of Hertfordshire a great deal of concern.

Mike Penning: I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has a short allowance of time, for giving way. Those cuts in local primary care in Hertfordshire are devastating. A recent letter leaked to me from the PCT indicated that £1 million of extra savings had to be made locally in primary care, which means that district nurses are going to be made redundant, as well as the acute nurses whom we will lose.

Mr. Walker: My hon. Friend makes a good point.

A paper published this month, entitled “The future of health visiting in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire”, by the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Local Medical Committee Ltd quotes a report by Amicus, which is a fantastic union, as I am a member of it. The Amicus “Who cares?” campaign reported that the number of whole-time equivalent health visitor jobs slumped to a 12-year low for England in 2005. That seems to conflict with the Minister’s comment in her opening speech that they were at an all-time high.

The report was written jointly with health visitors. It went on:

“The meeting recognised that it is now necessary for Health Visitors to concentrate their sparse resources on the under 5s; Health Visitors reluctantly feeling that they have no alternative but to reduce their input into older children and the rest of the family, unless absolutely necessary, and the elderly. GPs are already aware of the loss of specific health promotion activities formerly carried out by Health Visitors since the move to a geographical basis rather than being practice allocated, naming specifically the loss of obesity clinics and smoking cessation activities.”

The current funding crisis within our PCT is causing a lot of concern to our general practitioners and to health visitors. The impact of those cuts is being felt by local service users.

We have been told that reductions in acute services will be offset by placing more services within local communities. That in itself may not be a bad thing. However, the experience of the Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust, our mental health trust, was that it lost beds while at the same time having to reduce services within the community. Specific services reduced include alcohol-related services. The issue of alcohol abuse, and treating those who are prone to such abuse, are as important, if not more important, than drug addiction, bearing in mind that alcohol is far more widely used and more widely abused.

Among the other services that have been cut within local communities are some that I would regard as public health services, including helping people suffering from depression or early-stage mental health illnesses. Often if we catch these illnesses at the beginning, when people start to be troubled by them, we can avoid significant costs and treatments further downstream.

Those are all areas of concern. Of course if we are not treating early-stage depression in the community, we eventually get greater pressure on GP services—GPs are already stressed and dealing with a large number of people—and then we get over-prescription of expensive medicines. Funding in our PCT is of huge concern, and paying back the deficit over the next two years is having an impact on local services.

Mr. Graham Stuart: I wonder whether I may, through my hon. Friend, put a point to the Minister. There are large, increasing numbers of people living in holiday homes and static caravans for much of the year—10 or 11 months of the year. A 65-year-old man living in a static caravan in a coastal area such as mine will bring only one 20th of the health funding of a permanent resident. That is an increasing issue in coastal and rural areas. I wonder whether he would like to comment. I hope that the Minister might touch on it later.

Mr. Walker: I do not represent a rural community, but I imagine that that would be of huge concern to those communities where it happens, because they bear the majority of the cost of looking after that person, although they are not in receipt of 95 per cent. of the normal funding.

May I talk briefly to Ministers about drugs? We have a number of excellent local support service providers within Hertfordshire. They are very small niche providers, but they understand the communities that they serve perfectly, and they provide a variety of services. One of the great joys of being a Member of Parliament is meeting truly fantastic people who for no financial reward, and with very little recognition beyond their peer group, work immensely long hours with extremely difficult and troubled people.

I am concerned that local groups such as those that I have referred to might be squeezed out by the imposition, or the promotion, of national or large regional contracts—admittedly the large organisations to which they are awarded are charities, but charities that operate on a far wider scale, and do not have many of the attributes of locally based organisations. I would urge the Minister to take my concerns seriously—but I shall not do so, because I know that she will indeed take them seriously. I also urge my own council to listen to the concerns of local service users about the type of services that they are accessing, because small and local solutions are often best suited to address the problems that we as a community are trying to resolve.

We in Broxbourne have all the problems that are prevalent in other constituencies. Broxbourne has a Conservative Member of Parliament, but in Waltham Cross, for example, there are many of the problems associated with inner cities. It is not a particularly wealthy town; it has a high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, high levels of addiction, and high levels of mental health problems.

I congratulate the Government on the Sure Start programme. It has been hugely welcome and successful, but recently we had to fight hard to ensure that we could get continued funding. I hope that that is the last time that we have to fight for that, because the service provided is of such outstanding quality and excellence, and its benefit to the community is so high, that I hope that in future it will be taken as a given that people in Waltham Cross will be able to access that high quality of service.

Public health is a massively important issue, and I am glad that we have had such a sensible debate. I am also glad that there is such a committed slimmer on the Labour Benches as the hon. Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard). I have not quite reached his degree of thinness, but I will work on that over the next few months.

5.32 pm

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PREVIOUS INTERVENTIONS IN THE SAME DEBATE

Mr. Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con): As someone who has lost 2½ stone over the past three months, I know that the hon. Gentleman is right. One must change one’s life; a diet is useless. One must change one’s whole outlook and one’s relationship with food.

Mr. Blizzard: I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his achievement. It is nice to know that we agree on that anyway.

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