Conservatives tabled a motion, which said:

That this House recognises that London has some of the leading hospitals and healthcare services and expertise in the world; notes with concern that some areas of London have the worst outcomes for stroke, heart disease and cancer in the country; is alarmed that health inequalities in the capital rank among the worst in the country; believes in improving services to meet the needs of London’s 7.5 million inhabitants; calls for the delivery of a public health strategy geared towards the reduction of health inequalities; calls on NHS London to halt the implementation of current sector-wide reconfiguration proposals across London, including accident and emergency services, until a more effective public consultation is in place; further calls for service configurations that are soundly evidence-based and which meet the choice of patients and the referral intentions of local GPs; further believes that consultant-led obstetric departments and maternity units should not be closed, whilst they are safe, accessible and responsive to a continuing need; and calls on NHS London and the Department of Health to publish the details of the commitments made at the time of the Olympics bid to fund healthcare services in the capital, and to disclose what the current estimate is of the cost of providing services for the Olympics and how it is proposed that this should be funded.

Mr Evennett made an intervention during Mr Lansley’s speech. He said “[Mr Lansley] has visited our area, south-east London, regularly to see at first hand the problems of health care that we had. The regrettable reorganisation that [Bob Neill MP] referred to is causing great concern locally about the provision and quality of health care that constituents will receive. There is failure in our area. What reassurance can [Mr Lansley] give our area about the future?

Mr Lansley replied that “I hope that I can give the reassurance that decisions will be made locally in relation to local needs, local patients’ choice and GP referral decisions. My visit with [Mr Evennett] to his constituency, and the example of Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup, begin to give the lie to the Government’s amendment-in that none of the changes will happen unless and until new services have been developed. That is far from the case at the moment, and it is assumed that patients who are denied access to hospital services will simply be accommodated elsewhere in the community at a lower cost. The assumptions are literally heroic, stating that it will be possible for 55 per cent. of out-patient and 60 per cent. of accident and emergency attendances to take place in the community rather than in the hospital”.

Bob Neill, MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, said “Is he aware that that concern is particularly reinforced in south-east London, where it seems that underlying assumptions based on a crisis-driven need to amalgamate three trusts into a huge super-trust are distorting the assumptions and the long-term planning, reinforced by the suggestion in documents seen by the South London Healthcare Trust, that the principal driver of this is to “right-size”-in other words, financially rectify-the enormous historic deficit that it inherited?”

James Brokenshire MP also contributed to the debate. He said “We have heard about the proposals being clinically led, but does [Mr Lansley] agree that some of the decisions have been made purely on the basis of private finance initiative contracts? The focus has been on hospitals with large PFI contracts. In north-east London, the focus is on centring everything around the Queen’s hospital and putting more pressure on it, and in south-east London, non-PFI hospitals such as Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup are effectively squeezed out. The focus is not on health care, but on finance and those PFI hospitals alone”.

For more information about this debate, you can read the text in Hansard by clicking here.