Once again, Harriet Harman eluded the predictions of such luminaries as the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue and alighted on the unexpected subject of cancer waiting times.
This strikes me as an excellent subject for Harman to choose. Labour introduced a “guarantee” for cancer patients to see a specialist within two weeks of seeing their GP. Most of us know someone who has had cancer and know that the first few weeks of doubt and fear are appallingly traumatic. The two week guarantee is a very “real” target which means a great deal to worried patients and their relatives.
David Cameron didn’t answer the question as to whether this government would keep the two week guarantee. Instead he asked about Labour’s “policy to cut NHS funding” – an enquiry which was, eventually, gently ruled out of order by the Speaker.
Cameron spoke about cutting down on bureaucracy. This fell very flat. “Bureaucracy” is a perjorative term. A guarantee to see a cancer specialist within two weeks is not seen as badness by people in general, I think Cameron will find.
Bureaucracy – bad.
Two week guarantee when you’re pole-axed with fear and anxiety – good.
We had all the campaigning about bureaucracy and targets from the Tories during the election campaign. But Harriet Harman, in one deft hip throw of political jujitsu, has turned the issue back to Cameron in a way which left him flat-footed and searching breathlessly for an escape route.
It is interesting that Harman waived her right to a final question. I suspect she might have thought “My work here is done today”.
Karen Buck MP for Westminster North, asked Cameron why he is “terrified” of his children attending local secondary schools in London. Again, no real answer from Cameron.
I suspect he may regret saying he is “terrified”. Hundreds of thousands of parents send their children to secondary schools in London. It is very doubtful that this government will do anything to improve investment in them.
So in a few years time, Cameron will be left with this question being posed to him: “Why can you not provide schools in London to which you are not terrified to send your children?”
* Paul Walter blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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12 Comments
Hm – this one isn’t a simple as Labour’s soundbites suggest. The two-week target was to see a specialist if you are suspected of having cancer not if you have been diagnosed with cancer. I suspect more flexibility here might make a lot of sense. Last year I had a breast lump. I saw my GP on April 1st (easy to remember!) but didn’t see a specialist until June 21st. On reflection this was perhaps a bit too long – but there is no way that I needed to see a specialist within two weeks
as I was low-risk because of my age and other factors. It causes me almost physical pain to agree with Lansley but he is right to say this is an area where a simple target distorts clinical priorities.
Besides, isn’t this another one of Labour’s “rights” or “guarantees” that they never actually identified funding for? (other than just sticking another couple of billion on Britannia’s Mastercard)
Well thats all right then we will just right of all advancments by labour in provision of health care as “billions on Britannia’s Mastercard”. for those of us that remember the provision pre Labour it is so reassuring to realise that the bearacracy is going to be cut, targets scraped etc, that this is going to be done as a matter of Dogma and with no recourse to if there is a worthy reason for the existance of the target, we wouldn;t want the fact that a beareacratic device saves lives to get in the way of scraping it would we.
Oh don’t get so hysterical!
I’m as big a fan of the NHS as anybody, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t potentially get the same clinical results by spending less on non-effective treatments (homeopathy for example) or by merging or scrapping administrative jobs and getting better efficiency out of them. Spending is a means to the end of getting better services. If we can spend less then we always should.
All the more so at the moment when we are spending more money than we have. When your income is less than your spending and there are no savings in the bank you have to either increase your income or cut what you spend. If this is now considered “ideological” then fine. It just seems like basic maths to me.
So Labour promised that you’d be able to see a specialist within 2 weeks. Does anybody have any hard data on whether they kept that promise?
It’s not like they did very well at that sort of thing in general, but I haven’t heard anything about this one in particular.
@benjamin – how would giving people treatments that, as you say, are non-effective be a good thing? Surely it’s worth spending a little more to have a treatment that works.
Don’t fudge. You get what you read on the packet. Cameron’s difficulty is that if you opt for diversity, local influence, and the power of a quick buck at the expense of patients you get unpredictable outcomes. This being so you cannot guarantee outcomes and they will differ by postcode. You pay your money you get your choice.
My point is that there before you cut bearacracy maybe it might be a good idea to see if the bearacracy you are cutting is doing a good thing, then to ask right how else can we achieve this result, then to ask which costs less, then to implement the cheapest. No this is not dogmatic it is common sense, this thought process does not seem to have been followed here hence the trouble the leader of your Government got into on this.
@ Paul Walter.
An excellent set of comments. Harman used a stilleto to reveal the lack of substance behind Cameron’s glib, oppressive, patronising charm.
What happended toi the Tories
Free cancer drugs for all
outrageous lie during the election and never delieverable
with regard to the 2 weeks great the Tory health minister said they would keep it and Ms Harman should listen more
then PM states later it may be scrapped
joined up Governmnet
Iain – my point was that homeopathy is something the NHS has been funding and which blatantly cannot and does not work. We should spend less money on such things (100% less IMO) and then we’d be able to implement the necessary cuts without harming actual medicine.
Bureaucracy is obviously a loaded word and of course there is much admin that NEEDS doing in a vast system like the NHS – but there is certainly also an element of waste and inefficiency. I get as angry as anyone about cuts to services and provision, even the forced ones we are soon going to see, but I don’t understand the lack of anger about the chronic waste of OUR money by Labour in the last few years who seem to have believed they could keep spending our cash to buy our votes and create unionised jobs and that when the bill eventually came we would just live with it.
Inefficiency in public services is a waste of the public’s money. We have no business complaining about poor families’ taxes going up if we fail to make the link with wasteful spending.
@benjamin
You saying the NHS is inefficient does not make it so . you give no examples and seem to be in the hope that if you say it enough it will become the truth because benjamin says so . Compared with the monstrous insurance based beaurocracies in the USA the NHS is extremely efficent .
Whilst there may be some further efficiencies to make this hysterical NHS bashing just seems to perpetuate the myth that cuts in real terms combined with the dogmatic madness of yet more reorganisation and privitisation will somehow not effect. care.