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  • Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on BBC Local Radio

    Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on BBC Local Radio

    The speech made by Sir Mike Penning, the Conservative MP for Hemel Hempstead, in the House of Commons on 8 December 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered the future of BBC Local Radio.

    I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the 100-odd colleagues from across the House who joined the application for this debate. For those who are watching and perhaps thinking that the Benches are a bit sparse, actually if everybody speaks for 10 minutes, we will fill the time perfectly. This is a great opportunity for colleagues across the House to send a message not only to the excellent Minister on the Front Bench, but to the BBC. I also thank the House of Commons Library for its excellent and balanced paper on the subject. I will try to explain to the BBC, with colleagues, where it has gone fundamentally wrong with the demise of local radio. Local radio provides a service to our constituents and our communities that commercial radio cannot provide. If the BBC is trying to compete with commercial radio in that space, then frankly it has lost the ethos of what the BBC is supposed to be about.

    There is a tax on all our constituents who have a TV or a computer that is able to receive a BBC programme. It is called the licence fee and it is a criminal offence not to have it. It was put in place all those years ago so that the BBC could provide a service that people could trust was impartial and was not going to come from any other source.

    Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)

    Does my right hon. Friend agree that impartiality is right at the front of the BBC’s ethos, but that in practice many of us in this Chamber—certainly, I do—find that BBC local radio, in my case Radio Humberside, is far more impartial than any national programme?

    Sir Mike Penning

    My right hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. I will come on to explain the matter of trust and how local radio is not allowed a level playing field, when it comes to programmes such as “Newsnight” or the cost of some BBC presenters. During covid, my constituents were massively reliant on the information coming from Three Counties Radio. They trusted it, they understood it and the presenters were literally their voice of information about what was going on during the pandemic.

    As the cold weather hits parts of the country—fortunately, although my part of the country is cold, the weather there will be nowhere near as difficult as the sort that some will have—there is no doubt that some schools will close. Where is the information that people can trust going to come from? Clearly, it will come from their local radio station. Some commercial radio stations will pick that up—that is fine—but actually that is the job of the BBC, because it takes the licence fee.

    The BBC gets about £3.5 billion from the licence fee and a further £1.5 billion from other sources. It is not for this House to tell the BBC how to spend that money, but we can give it advice. Some of that advice has been brought to me by my constituents, who are literally in tears that some presenters on local radio stations in my part of the world have been given pre-redundancy notices before Christmas, telling them that they should apply for their jobs. In some cases, those jobs will not be there.

    Let us look at what the BBC has decided to do. It is proposing to allow our local radio stations to go a bit longer in the morning, until about 2 pm, and then we will be regionalised.

    Colum Eastwood (Foyle) (SDLP)

    I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. An announcement was made last week about my local radio station, Radio Foyle, and we will not even get morning programming. There will not be a local voice on Radio Foyle in the north-west of Northern Ireland until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The breakfast programme is being stripped away and more than half of the news staff are being got rid of to save £420,000. BBC Northern Ireland’s budget is £55 million. In effect, it will destroy a local radio station, going against what its own charter says about providing local people with access to local news, all to save a measly £420,000. The BBC has a massive number of staff in Belfast and two massive buildings, but the axe is falling on the local community in the north-west of Northern Ireland. Surely the right hon. Gentleman would agree that that is an absolute disgrace.

    Sir Mike Penning

    The hon. Gentleman represents the voice of his constituents in an excellent way in the House this afternoon. Knowing the Province as I do—once in uniform and then as a Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office—I know how important the local radio stations are. The interesting thing is that I do not think the BBC really knows what it wants to do. What is its ethos? Where is it going? For instance, in my part of the world it will cut local radio in the afternoon, but in his part of the world it will cut it in the morning. I would argue that both are very important.

    To go back to my earlier point, we are now in winter. Parents will take their children to school, and it is quite possible that sometimes—especially in the northern parts of this great country of ours—those children will have to go home early. Schools will do their level best, but it is the local radio stations that will tell parents which schools will be open the following day, which will be open that evening, and whether they need to collect their children early—I hear that all the time on my local radio station. The people involved are dedicated, and they are not the very rich people who work for the BBC.

    When the Secretary of State came to the House to answer questions on this issue a few weeks ago, it was shocking that the Department had been told what was happening only the day before, because I had been told on the Friday by some local radio stations that they knew about it then. It is shocking that what is really an extension of Government—because the BBC takes the licence fee—did not tell the Government what was going on so that we could tell the House. That is absolutely disgusting and fundamentally wrong. Mr Speaker quite rightly complains bitterly when things are announced outside the House, but this was also about people’s jobs and our communication with our constituents.

    I went back to listen to some of the comments from people in local radio—I have to be careful here, because I want to protect them and not put them in an even more difficult position—and they said, “Mr Penning, it is not a level playing field. I’m not allowed to have another job, apart from working for the BBC.” A few people are on slightly different contracts, but the vast majority have contracts that say they cannot have another job in broadcasting.

    I named a gentleman in this Chamber who works for the BBC and who has been on our TV quite a lot recently because of the World cup—the gentleman’s name is Gary Lineker. I said that I thought that it was fundamentally unfair that he earns £1.35 million, or slightly more—that has been declared by the BBC as his income—and others, such as Zoe Ball on Radio 2’s “The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show”, earn just short of £1 million. I do not know about Zoe Ball’s contract, but what we know about Gary Lineker’s contract is that not only does he do advertisements for a certain company that makes crisps, but he works on BT Sport. My local radio people are not allowed to do that.

    I got lambasted by a Daily Mail journalist who said, “Stop picking on Gary Lineker.” I am not picking on him; I just think it is unfair that our local radio people are now prevented from having a job, while he can go and do jobs galore. I am not going to be a hypocrite; I have declared other interests outside this House. That is within my contract. Others who work in local radio cannot work in other ways. There are people who have been given their pre-redundancy notice and told that they need to apply for their job, but their jobs will not be there.

    What can the Minister do for us this afternoon? He is an excellent Minister, but his job, rightly, is not to run the BBC. It is for this House, however, to send a message to the BBC that it has got it fundamentally wrong to attack that low-hanging fruit—our local radio station presenters—without understanding the damage that that will do to our communities around the country.

    Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)

    This is a message that we need to send not only to the BBC, but to the regulator, Ofcom. The service licences under which BBC local radio operates are so woolly that, frankly, there are no obligations in place that require it to be specifically local to the area that it is required to serve. Given that we are in a mid-term review of the BBC, is it not time that Ofcom had some teeth and required the BBC to do what it is set out to do?

    Sir Mike Penning

    My hon. Friend has read my mind. As he may have noticed, I do not read speeches in this House because my dyslexia prevents me, so I try to memorise what I am going to say, and I was about to move on to Ofcom.

    Because the licence fee is a tax and people have to pay it, there has to be regulation. Ofcom provides that regulation. It is for the Government to set the parameters, for Ofcom to regulate and for the BBC to decide how to deliver its services. I find it inconceivable that Ofcom would sit back and allow this to happen when it is Ofcom’s job to ensure that the BBC fulfils its role and does what it was supposed to do when we set it up with a licence fee all those years ago.

    I am conscious that many colleagues across the House want to speak this afternoon, and I am really interested to hear what they say. The BBC has done brilliant things and has some brilliant programmes. I have fallen out with it many a time; I do not go on “Newsnight” these days, because it is cheaper just to phone up all the people who watch it—200,000, which is smaller than the number of people who listen to their local radio station in my part of the world.

    Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)

    My right hon. Friend and I share a local station, BBC Three Counties Radio. I am sure he agrees that every single one of its 250,000 listeners must enjoy the shows. As he says, it gives important local voices the power to reach into people’s homes when they are needed—it did that perfectly during the pandemic. I pay tribute to BBC Three Counties and all its presenters for their work.

    Sir Mike Penning

    I too congratulate BBC Three Counties, not just because of its work in the pandemic but because it picks up many local issues for us.

    I congratulate the BBC on managing to unite this House in a way that we probably have not seen for quite some time. This Chamber is confrontational by nature—it does what it says on the tin, really—but I can almost guarantee that colleagues are here today because they want to look after their constituents and want their constituents to get the best possible value from the BBC.

    If this is all about money, I cannot understand why the BBC is spending £5 billion, of which £3.5 billion is taxpayers’ money, but it cannot find a better way. If people cannot look after Radio Foyle instead of saving peanuts in cash terms, and if they cannot look after our local station Three Counties Radio, frankly they need to get another job, because they are not running their organisation correctly.

  • Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on Accountability in the NHS

    Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on Accountability in the NHS

    The speech made by Mike Penning, the Conservative MP in Hemel Hempstead, in Westminster Hall, House of Commons, on 30 November 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered accountability in the NHS.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I called this debate on accountability in the NHS. As a nation, we love our NHS which does a fantastic job for us, day in, day out. However, like any human being or organisation, sometimes it makes mistakes. When the NHS makes mistakes, the process of trying to get an apology or a mistake rectified is invariably a bureaucratic nightmare.

    I have a couple of examples I would like to raise. I have permission from one to use their name, but I probably will not do so, because I will yet again pass correspondence to the Minister. I appreciate that the Minister here, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), is not responsible in the Department for this subject. The relevant Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), is on the Floor of the House answering questions, and I thank this Minister for explaining why she is not here.

    We in Parliament are here to speak up for those who sometimes cannot speak up for themselves. When something goes wrong, Sir George, you would think we could get answers for constituents and get matters rectified, but within the NHS there is a lack of ministerial accountability, which I will come to in a moment. The complaints procedure eventually ends up with the ombudsman, but it takes for ever. There is a feeling in my constituency that, when things go wrong, the longer the process can be delayed, the more people will just accept what has happened. In some cases, they will sadly not be around any more. For their families and loved ones, this short debate is very important.

    Probably the most dramatic example for me, not of the physical effects of surgery but of the effect on someone’s life, concerns one of my constituents. The NHS decided in 1986 that he needed an operation on his nose, but the operation that took place was not the one that was supposed to. I will use the language: it was botched. It was probably not intentional; it was a mistake but, to this day, that has had detrimental effects on his quality of life.

    My constituent tried to go through the process of getting it rectified. I have tried to find out what was going on. He has pushed from pillar to post by different trusts: University College London and West Hertfordshire. I have written to previous Ministers over the years, only to be told that Ministers do not interfere in individual cases. I accept that but, when we reach a situation where there is nowhere else to go, ministerial accountability is important.

    Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)

    I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, not least for the sensitivity of the issues he is raising. Ministers under Governments of all colours have sought to keep NHS operational matters at arm’s length. Does he agree that that reduces accountability and effectiveness? I am thinking more generally about the current huge backlog in cancer diagnosis and treatment. I do not see any direct and urgent Government intervention. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that is partly the result of the lack direct operational accountability for Ministers to the service?

    Sir Mike Penning

    I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. We have seen during covid that, actually, when things get really bad, Ministers can step in and Prime Ministers can step in, but when we talk about individual cases, they cannot.

    In the case I am referring to, I ended up writing to the Minister, to be told to go to the ombudsman. I got fobbed off by the ombudsman, after we had been to the trust three or four times. I then wrote to the Minister again—this is over the course of years—to be told to take legal advice. This particular person has now been told, “Go back to your GP and get them to re-refer you if you’ve still got problems.” He has problems because they did not do the operation properly in the first place, and it has had a massive long-term effect on this gentleman’s quality of life.

    That is not the only case. I have been here for nearly 18 years, and I worked for a Member of Parliament for many years before that. In every constituency, this sort of case is brought before the MP. I have another example. Last summer, in the middle of heatwave in July, when the temperatures were unbelievably high, a very vulnerable young lady was brought in for a scan at my local hospital. She is the most vulnerable young lady. Her mother cares for her 24/7. She has carers in. She is a wheelchair user or bed-bound. She was left on a trolley in the heat for five hours when her ambulance did not arrive.

    When I contacted the trust and said, “What happened there?” it blamed the ambulance trust. When I contacted the ambulance trust, it said, “No, it was cancelled by the trust—it was their fault.” I do not care whose fault it was. It was the NHS’s fault that this happened to a very vulnerable young lady. She had no drink and no food. She was very, very ill. The ambulance trust said that the return journey was cancelled because she was so poorly on the trolley—well, she was so poorly because she had been left there for five hours!

    Trying to get to the bottom of what happens within the NHS when something goes wrong is so difficult. We have seen terrible situations in maternity services and in trusts around the country. These problems need to be addressed early on, instead of the drawbridge being brought up and people having to go through a massive complaints procedure where they have to complain three times before going to the ombudsman, and then the ombudsman will say it is out of time, and if they are not careful, they cannot go to court because that is out of time too. Is that the way we want our NHS to be seen by the public, who love the NHS?

    The NHS sees the NHS as a single entity. As MPs—and I was a shadow Health Minister for four and a half years—we understand that it is not a single entity. It is a set of silos where everybody passes the buck back and forth. What we need is joined-up thinking. When Members like myself write to Ministers about these issues, the answer is not to say, “Nothing to do with me, guv” and pass it down the line to the ombudsman or a lawyer. That surely costs more money and does not put the NHS in a particularly good light with my constituents who have had their operations botched

    Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

    I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. He talks about silos, and I want to give him an example of that in my constituency. Many people await their care packages in order to be released from hospital and get better at home. On the other hand, there are people waiting urgently for hospital beds who cannot get one. Does he agree that there must be greater communication between trust managers and social care workers to ensure efficiency of care in the community, which would free up hospital beds and allow people to be treated quicker? In other words, we should do away with the silos and get things co-ordinated.

    Sir Mike Penning

    I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I know that right next to my constituency, my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) goes to Watford General Hospital and looks at the boards to see whether people can medically be discharged, but they cannot because there is a lack of joined-up thinking.

    This is different. This is about the need for the NHS, when it may or may not have made a mistake, to address it full-on at the start. It should not draw up the drawbridge, with people having to go through the long, drawn-out procedure of making complaints and going to the ombudsman. For a Minister to say to a colleague and fellow MP, “Perhaps this person needs to take legal advice,” is not the attitude we should have towards people who have done the right thing. The NHS has said that they should have an operation, and the NHS has mucked up and botched—I use that word under privilege. At the same time, the person’s life has been detrimentally affected for years and years to come.

    I know the Minister is not the Minister responsible, but because we are all constituency MPs, I guarantee that before he was in his position, people were at his surgeries or wrote to him to say, “This happened to me within the NHS. What can you do to help me do something about it?” Somewhere along the line, perhaps the short debate we are having today will nudge the Department of Health and Social Care and the Government —I was a Minister in several Departments—to look at ministerial oversight.

    Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)

    The right hon. Gentleman is making a fantastic speech. In the light of this week’s shocking reports from Byline Times about the amount of sexual abuse and rapes that have occurred in hospital settings, does he agree that to improve accountability, we need the Government not only to urgently repeal the five-year rule, which limits some people from making complaints to the NHS, but to have clear, systematic and consistent data collection on all sexual misconduct across all hospital settings?

    Sir Mike Penning

    As usual, I agree with the hon. Lady. We do not agree on everything, but we agree on 99% of things.

    This is the crux of the matter, and there are two real issues here. In the case that I spoke about earlier, which goes way back to the ’80s, the gentleman’s mental and physical health has not been great. Other people, including the extreme examples alluded to by the hon. Lady, may be mentally affected in a way that I and many of the people in this room probably cannot understand. To have a block exclusion post five years seems so arbitrary in the modern world. The Government really must look at whether there should be an arbitrary rule and perhaps leave it to others to decide, rather than setting down in regulation the exceptional circumstances that might well have been in place. Trusts do have delegated powers—many more powers than I think they should have—and I know the new Act will help that, but it does not take into consideration the points that we have tried to raise in this morning’s debate.

    If we had this debate on the Floor of the House, I think we would have a full Chamber of colleagues. Rather than talking down the NHS, they would be saying, “When things go wrong, we need to address them.” When I was Police Minister, there was a big mistake under my portfolio, and I went before the House, explained that mistakes were made on the funding formula and put my hands up. I took a lot of flak for that, but it was a way to address things going forward. With the NHS being such a massive organisation, and an organisation that the public want to be able to trust, it must be better for us to address the issues at the start of a complaint.

    The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, did not write the letter that I mentioned; it was written by her officials, who desperately want to defend the NHS. The complaint was not about the NHS in general; it was about a specific issue that we need to address. We are all here as Members of Parliament because we are supposed to represent the taxpayer—representation through taxation. I should be able to represent my constituents in that way without being told to go to the ombudsman. I know I have to go to the ombudsman, because I have been here a very long time, so I am capable of working that out. I am also capable of working out that we are outside the time limit, given the five-year rule.

    We need a change of mindset. I do not want individual Ministers to say, “This operation should take place, that one shouldn’t, and the hospital should have this number of wards”, but there has to be ministerial oversight when things go well, and when things go wrong.

    My constituent has given me permission to raise his case. I think it would be more useful not to put his name on the record here, but I will pass another letter to the Minister, which I hope might get a little more positivity when the Minister responsible writes back to me, rather than a response that fobs us off and says, “Please go away.”

  • Mike Penning – 2018 Speech on Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care

    Below is the text of the speech made by Sir Mike Penning, the Conservative MP for Hemel Hempstead, in the House of Commons on 13 March 2018.

    First, may I say what a privilege it is to have secured this Adjournment debate this evening, and how proud I am of my constituents who for so many years have been fighting the changes and particularly the cuts to healthcare in the Dacorum area where my constituency sits? In particular, I thank Edie and Ron Glatter and the Dacorum Hospital Action Group and its fantastic chair Betty Harris, who is very poorly; they have been fighting this campaign for many years. I also pay tribute to the fantastic work our local BBC radio station, BBC Three Counties, has done over the years, in particular that of the excellent journalist and reporter Justin Dealey; without his work, this debate would probably not have taken place.

    For the national health service to carry on being the world-class service it is today, the public, our constituents, need to have faith not only in the fantastic doctors, nurses and porters and those who run the frontline services, but in the management of our hospitals and health provision. I am sorry to say, however, that the trust and feeling of commitment we need from our health service management in our part of the world are not just broken, but have completely failed.

    I will not go into the history because tonight I want to talk about the urgent care centre, but the history of what has been happening to out-of-hours and urgent care, including A&E, in my constituency has been going on for many years. The previous Labour Administration decided to close the A&E and all acute services at the Hemel hospital after they had already been closed at the St Albans hospital, with all services moved into a Victorian hospital next to a football ground in Watford. We will not dwell on that tonight, however, but will come back to it on another evening.

    As part of the sop to my community, we were given an urgent care centre—24/7, seven days a week, throughout the day and night—and next to it a walk-in GP centre. I was therefore surprised when Ms Fisher, chief executive of the West Hertfordshire Hospitals Trust, phoned me just before Christmas to say that, sadly, the urgent care centre would have to temporarily close on safety grounds at night. I was shocked by that, not least because the A&E in Watford struggles greatly, so the more people we can encourage to use other NHS facilities instead, the better. I said, “This is happening over Christmas which is one of the busy times,” and was told, “Don’t worry, Mr Penning, it’s only a temporary thing and we’ll have it open again just after Christmas.” They then put out a press release headed “Temporary overnight closure of Hemel Hempstead Urgent Care Centre”. Interestingly, that press release is still on their website today. I actually printed it off before I came into the Chamber this evening. As I go through my comments, Members will realise just how false that statement was.

    One of my constituents then contacted Three Counties Radio, and Justin Dealey, its excellent reporter— acquired an interview with the said Ms Fisher, the chief executive of West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust. It was quite a long interview, in which Ms Fisher indicated:

    “This is a short-term measure which is us acting in the interest of patient safety because, for the next few weeks over the festive period, we are unable to secure GP cover.”

    I think most people would understand that, but not if they knew that the GPs were working in the room next door. But that is a separate issue. Justin went on to suggest that surely Ms Fisher understood that local constituents would have real concerns, and asked her whether she would be concerned if she lived in the area. She said:

    “I completely understand their concerns, but what I want to reassure the residents of Hemel is that if there were to be any permanent change it would be our absolute intention to include people fully”

    in that decision. She went on to say that

    “legally we would be obliged to consult for a permanent change of that nature.”

    That press release was issued not before Christmas this year but in December 2016. We have had no night provision at all in Hemel since then. Everybody has to go for urgent treatment to Watford A&E. Alternatively, they have to dial 111, which is an excellent service, but after they have been triaged they apparently get sent to Watford A&E. Watford has just come out of special measures, and I praise the work that has been done at the hospital but there is still a lot more to be done.

    Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP) I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I sought his permission to intervene on him beforehand. He is outlining very well the issue with the Hemel Hempstead urgent care centre. Does he agree that, although there is immense staffing pressure, closing or scaling back on urgent care units and minor injury units only adds to the pressure on A&Es? There must be more investment in these mid-level centres if we are to prevent the A&Es from crumbling under the weight of the work they have to do.

    Sir Mike Penning I clearly agree with my hon. Friend. It was kind of him to come and tell me that he wanted to intervene on me on behalf of other parts of the country that are facing similar pressures.

    This was not about money. Normally, when our constituents come to talk to us, especially about the health service, it is about money. They tell us that they are really concerned that there is not enough money to provide the services, but on this occasion we were told that this was nothing to do with money. It was to do with the contractual problem with the GPs. We kept on asking what was going to happen, and then—completely out of the blue and still without consultation—we were told that the Government had said that there should be no more urgent care centres and that they should become urgent treatment centres instead. I was repeatedly told that it was the Government saying that this should be done. I asked whether the Government had said that the centre should not be open 24/7. I was told no, but that we had to move to being an urgent treatment centre. In the past couple of weeks, the unit has changed from being an urgent care centre to being an urgent treatment ​centre. Interestingly enough, that means that paramedics and nurse practitioners are running the facility, and in many cases—without being rude to our GPs—they have more skills than a basic GP. I have to declare an interest, in that I was a military paramedic, so I am slightly biased about these things.

    But was there a consultation before that decision was made, not just to close the UCC but to change to a UTC? No, there was not, even though it is a legal requirement to have one. We are now in a consultation, however. I could not believe it when I first heard this, but I have now heard from several constituents that in the actual meetings that took place—not when people were writing in—when different plans and options were being put to my constituents, a member of the clinical commissioning group staff was at the table trying to convince the public what sort of option they should go for. If we are going to consult the public, surely we should trust them and then have the confidence to listen to them.

    What I find really fascinating about what is happening in my part of the world is that people from nowhere near my constituency—from the other side of Watford—are being consulted. They would never come to my facility in a million years—unless they just happen to be in the area—but they apparently have the same rights in this consultation as my constituents, who are again losing facilities hand over fist. Those other views are being taken into consideration because they happen to be part of the trust area. My constituents just scratch their heads and say, “This is illogical.” This facility, even though it is part of the NHS and anybody could come to it, is obviously being used by the largest town in Hertfordshire and the other towns and villages within Dacorum. However, I have no problem with the people of St Albans being consulted over this, because they are clearly part of the process.

    Trust has been severely damaged. A highly paid chief executive of an NHS trust went on the radio—telling an MP is one thing, but going public is another—and tells listeners, “This is temporary. Please do not worry; it will all be okay. By the way, if I did actually change the service, that would be illegal because I have not consulted.” Frankly, when they then did not consult—the UCC is quite clearly never going to open again—that breaks the trust.

    I have raised the accountability issue in the House before. It is absolutely right that my good friend the Minister on the Front Bench does not make decisions about what A&Es and UCCs are open and how many beds there should be. Those are quite clearly clinical decisions that should be based on knowledge and demand in the area—that is not what happened when our A&E was closed—but we seem to have moved from one extreme to another. I am told that if we want to challenge the consultation, the only way is to put the decision to judicial review based on the consultation. We tried that when the A&E was closed and we got a judicial review. The judge was generous and said, “You have a moral case, but you probably don’t have a clinical case. You don’t have a case in law, because the consultation was done.” However, if the consultation was a complete sham or did not take place at all, where do we go?

    I have asked Ministers, I have tabled questions and I have been to see the Secretary of State. At the end of the day, who are these people accountable to? I know that ​we can go to the health committees at the local council, but they do not have the powers to say that an individual or a trust has brought the NHS into disrepute, and yet that is what has happened here. Nobody was twisting the chief executive’s arm to go on the radio and say what she said. We all listened to it—I got a transcript the following morning—and I sat with Justin and said, “Well, that’s it, Justin. We’re okay.” I was not at all happy about the facility being closed over the 2016 Christmas period, but at least we knew that GPs were going to be recruited and that we were going to get there.

    However, the exact opposite has happened. We are not getting the GPs back, and now the facility being open 24 hours a day is only one of the options. I know that the Minister’s notes will say how many people used to go to it at night and so on, but half the problem was that it was never properly promoted. There are access issues at the A&E because so many people are turning up and being triaged when a huge percentage of them do not need to be at an A&E but somewhere else within the NHS. I would argue that they should be at a UCC or UTC or that a GP should come out to them, but that is a separate issue because hardly any GPs make home visits in my constituency.

    I know exactly how things work, because I was a Minister for a while and know about the advice that comes down from the trust and the clinical commissioning group, which will say things that are different from what I have said. However, I can honestly say that if there is one issue in my constituency that absolutely unites every political persuasion on my patch, it is the acute health provision in my constituency. We pushed a coffin on a hospital trolley all the way from Hemel Hempstead Hospital to Watford, to indicate that lives would be lost. We had debate after debate with the ambulance service, which said, “Don’t worry, we can get the ambulances there on time.” It probably could, if it rushed them through on a blue light in the middle of the night—if an ambulance was available. Because of the previous Administration’s botching of the regionalisation of the ambulance service, there are often not that many ambulances available, even though the ambulance depot is on my patch.

    People do not want to clog up A&E; they want to have the confidence that there is somewhere safe that they and their kids can go for treatment. We have no idea what the conclusion of this retrospective consultation will be. We have no faith that even if the conclusions are in agreement with what we want, we will actually get it. Not all my constituents agree with me, but in a treatment centre I would rather have a highly qualified paramedic nurse practitioner than—I have to choose my words carefully here—an ordinary GP, simply because the paramedic nurse practitioner has so much experience in that area. That is where the modernisation of the health service has been so brilliant. But after telling me that the decision was not about money, it is, frankly, disgusting to sit people down at consultation meetings and try to convince them that it would be better if the centre was not open 24 hours a day.

    I hope that the Minister understands how passionate we are about the matter. My constituency is 17 minutes from London and it shares a boundary with yours, Mr Speaker. People in the top part of my constituency all go to Luton and Dunstable—quite rightly so; it is an ​excellent facility—and those in the bottom part of my constituency, or anyone who comes off the M1 and the M25, end up going to Watford for their acute care.

    I want Watford General Hospital to succeed. I think the location of the site is completely ludicrous, and we need a new general hospital for the growing population in our part of the world. I know that you have pressures on housing, Mr Speaker, as we have. But I want the houses, because I want people to have somewhere to live—so many families are struggling at the moment—and if we are to build those houses, we need facilities, such as schools and everything else. When my constituents go to bed at night, they need to know that the urgent care centre is open in case something happens; and that if they cannot cope, we can blue-light them to Watford or to Luton and Dunstable.

    I have tried for weeks and weeks to get this Adjournment debate. My hon. Friend the Minister is lucky, because I had been asking for a 60-minute debate in Westminster Hall. We may yet end up there, but that will depend a lot on what he says from the Dispatch Box.