Sir Mike Penning speaks in a debate on the new hospitals building programme and calls for a new hospital for west Hertfordshire and full accountability of NHS Hospital Trusts.
Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma, as was alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan). This debate is enormously important. Hospitals are often the heart of our communities. The staff in our hospitals, whatever job they do, do a fantastic job, and it is right and proper that we pay tribute to them. But the environment that they work in is also vital to them.
To give a little history lesson from Hemel Hempstead and South West Hertfordshire, which is my part of the world, we had three hospitals—three acute hospitals—until just over 20 years ago when St Albans was closed as an acute hospital. The promise was made at the time that the emergency facility would be picked up by Hemel Hempstead and partly by Watford. That promise was made and then, sadly, Hemel Hempstead was closed—I am not going to get into party politics, but it was by the previous Administration—and we fought tooth and nail, as most constituency MPs would, to save it. Now we have partly elective surgery for non-emergency care at St Albans and I have a clinic—there is no other way I can describe it—at Hemel hospital. Three quarters, if not more, of my hospital is boarded up or vandalised on a site worth hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds.
I was thrilled—absolutely thrilled—when the Prime Minister announced at the general hospital in Watford, which is the only acute hospital we have left in our part of the world, that we were in the top six to get a brand-new hospital. That thrilled us not because we wanted suddenly to bring back our hospital—we understand the restrictions on doing so and what a modern hospital needs to provide for a community—but within hours of the Prime Minister announcing that we were in the top six and that there was the funding, unlike what it sounds as though the management did in my hon. Friend’s constituency, the management ruled out a new hospital on a greenfield site.
As for many of my colleagues, the population in my part of the world on the edge of London is booming. We have a thriving economy, and we have more jobs than we actually have people to fill them, even after the pandemic. The population is growing massively, and I have 20,000 homes coming to my own constituency in the next 15 years. The logic of not building a new hospital on an available greenfield site is confusing to everybody, especially to those who know that Watford hospital is a Victorian hospital next to the Watford Football Club ground in the middle of a Victorian town. All we have been offered is a refurbishment of Watford and a running down even more of the Hemel site.
What fascinates me is that the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust seems to be completely unaccountable to the politicians who are giving them the money to look after care in our constituencies. I know that the Health and Care Bill going through Parliament at the moment is going to address that going forwards, but it does not address the historical problem going backwards. The trust spent millions of pounds proving that we cannot have a new hospital on a greenfield site, rather than actually spending some of its consultancy money proving that we could have it on a greenfield site.
My constituents had been campaigning to save the Hemel hospital long before I was around, and there is cross-party support in our part of the world for saying, “Watford is not the right place, and it is not a new hospital. It is a refurbished hospital in completely the wrong place. Please see sense.” I fully understand that Watford constituents are worried they might lose their hospital, but they will not lose it because nothing is going to close until the new one opens. However, we have already lost ours, and the largest town in Hertfordshire has a clinic, with proposals for no intermediate care beds whatsoever and with pathology being taken away as we speak.
The point I want to make to the Minister is that, when we look at the bids that come in, we have to be careful that trusts have done what they were supposed to do, which is to look at the best possible options for the community they are supposed to serve, in the same way that we are serving them, rather than be blindfolded by the situation. In my case, the trust seems fixated with one site in the middle of a town and next to a football stadium, which by anybody’s logic would seem to be ludicrous.
I wish Watford every success—they may well stay up again this season. I am not a Watford fan, although most of my constituents are. I am sad to say I am a Spurs supporter, and that comes with a lot of problems, as we know. However, when Watford play at home, there is a massive knock-on effect on the hospital next door. Believe it or not, but the trust gives up some of its parking spaces to the football club, which is an historical agreement.
I can give an instance of when an ambulance was turned away from the route it would normally take into the hospital because Watford were playing at home. I am not blaming Watford and I am not blaming the police for this; it is just a logistical problem. The ambulance was turned away and sent on a different route as the road was closed because of the home game. I said to the police officer in charge, “If one of your officers had been injured, what would you have done? Would you have allowed that ambulance through?” He said, “Of course, we would have done.” The guy in the back of the ambulance that was trying to get to hospital had had a heart attack; fortunately he survived.
That is the sort of illogical thinking that is going on in some of the trusts, though clearly not in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich. In my trust, its unaccountability to do what is right for the people it serves seems to be blindfolded. I politely ask the Minister, as he knows I have been pushing on this for more years than I can remember, please do not trust the management of my trust to give the full information. We want a new hospital on a greenfield site. I have letters showing that there is £590 million available for that, but not for refurbishment.
The Minister for Health (Edward Argar)
...
Let me turn to points made by other hon. and right hon. Members. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) will not be surprised that I will not be drawn on the specifics of the internal politics and the plans for his trust at this point. However, he quite rightly made the extremely important point that when trusts develop their plans and bring them forward, they need to carry the communities they serve with them and genuinely reflect on stakeholder input from elected Members and others, rather than—I am not saying that this is or is not the case with this trust—automatically having a preconceived idea of what the right answer is.
Sir Mike Penning
rose—
Edward Argar
I may regret this, but I give way to my right hon. Friend.
Sir Mike Penning
The Minister might not be willing to say that my trust has preconceived the decisions it was going to make; I will, because it made its mind up long before the latest announcement. However, we are in a slightly different position from other colleagues here. We are in HIP 1—part 1 of the health infrastructure plan—and we do not want that money to be wasted. We do not want a sticking plaster; we do not want a refurbishment in the middle of Watford. The community in my part of the world is absolutely solid on that, and if that meant that we slipped out of HIP 1 into HIP 2—I will put my neck on the block—I would be happy with that, as long as we get the right facility on a greenfield site, rather than the wrong facility as a refurbishment in the middle of Watford next to a football ground.
Edward Argar
I did not regret giving way to my right hon. Friend quite as much as I feared I might, although he may yet come back to me. As ever, he makes his point powerfully and clearly, and I suspect that, as well as my having heard it, his trust will also have heard it.