Jeremy Hunt MP: speeches

Speeches

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  I want to start by thanking the Minister for the emphasis that the Bill places on a single patient record. Despite many problems in NHS care, that is an area where the NHS is a world leader, but putting a single patient record on the right legal footing, making it possible to share data with proper governance, gives the NHS an opportunity to become a world leader in artificial intelligence, and it creates the opportunity to transform care for patients, so that has my full support. I speak in support of new clause 25. The biggest structural reform in this Bill is the abolition of NHS England, but my worry is that there are other structural reforms that are not in the Bill that would have a much bigger impact on patient care. New clause 25 is about continuity of care, particularly in general practice and maternity. It is now very clear to many people that the abolition of the old GP list system in the 2004 contract changes was a huge mistake. In fact, restoring the system so that GPs have their own patients was part of the Labour manifesto, so that is an issue that the Government understand, but it is not in the Bill. A study in Norway, published in the British Journal of General Practice in 2022, of over 4 million patients showed that patients who have their own doctor for more than 15 years are 30% less likely to need out-of-hours care, 28% less likely to need hospital care and 25% less likely to die. Why is that? Because GPs who know their patients are less likely to make mistakes, more likely to give an accurate diagnosis and will better calibrate risk, as they will have situational awareness of a patient and their family. The experience of a patient is infinitely better when they are dealing with a GP whom they know. Instead of that, we have moved to a system in which many GP surgeries effectively operate like call centres. People will contact a GP and they may never see that GP again. It is exactly the same when someone calls 111, if you get put through to a clinician. Contacting a GP in the NHS should never be like calling an Uber driver who will never be seen again.

• 7 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is speaking wisely. Of course, this is not just about massively improving care for patients—it is also about improving motivation for doctors and GPs, who are among the most demoralised groups in the NHS. There is a GP surgery in Horfield, in the Bristol area, that kept the old GP list system, as 10% of surgeries have done. When I chaired the Health and Social Care Committee, I interviewed Dr Lee from that surgery and he said that because around 60% of the patients they see every day are their own patients, they do not have any problem with GP retention. The GPs who go to work there are happy, because they are seeing people they know. That would be transformative for morale inside general practice. People might very reasonably say, “Well, you were in that job for rather a long time. Why didn’t you restore that system?”. I want to share a little secret with the House: I did actually try to do that. I changed the GP contract in 2015 so that every NHS patient in England has a named, accountable clinician. Unfortunately, I was outfoxed by the system. As a result of that change, on every electronic patient record, every one of us here will have a named accountable GP on the record. However, absolutely nothing else changed, and the NHS continued as it had done. The Bill offers a real opportunity to transform care, as well as transforming life for GPs and patients. The same principle applies to maternity care. We know from inquiry after inquiry that despite reams of recommendations, things have not been getting better. If every mum was told at the moment she knew that she was pregnant, “This is the team who will be responsible for the safe delivery of your baby, in antenatal, birthing and post-natal,” we would restore the personal connection to maternity care. That is one of the biggest issues coming from so many mothers; they say that they feel anonymous in the system, and not listened to. At its best, the NHS delivers absolutely incredible care—I have three wonderful children who exist because of amazing NHS care—but at its worst, it turns patients into numbers and human suffering into box-ticking. Lots of things are necessary to turn that around, but one of the biggest things is restoring continuity of care, so that every patient always knows who is the doctor responsible for their care. That is why I urge the Government to consider how to restore continuity of care in both general practice and maternity, if that is not going to be done through this Bill.

• 1 Sept 2026 · UK Financial Services · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I speak today as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for financial markets and services. I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which states that I accept speaking engagements from financial services companies. I thank the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley (Callum Anderson) not just for securing this debate, but for an excellent opening speech. He has a background in the City—in the stock exchange and working for the City of London corporation—which is probably unusual in his party. I thank him for deploying his expertise, because it is incredibly important for UK financial services that the world sees that there are experts in financial services on both sides of the House. I particularly welcome his comments today. I welcome the Economic Secretary to the Treasury back to her role, which she carried out previously with great distinction. She has always engaged extremely constructively when it comes to the interests of the City and financial services. I know that her return to that post was widely welcomed. It is also a pleasure to speak alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier)—an old friend—who himself has a background in the London stock exchange. After the financial crisis in 2008, financial services had a pretty bad name. The Government had to put up around £1 trillion to support the sector. Chief executives of banks made very ill-judged decisions to continue paying themselves large bonuses at a time when the rest of the country was suffering, and the country suffered a longer and deeper recession at that time as a result of our exposure to the financial services sector, which was much greater than that of our peers. We learned many painful lessons in that period. As well as the financial crisis, the sector had to deal with the loss of passporting rights post-Brexit. Despite those body blows, the sector employs 2.5 million people—more than at the time of Brexit—and two thirds of the jobs are outside London. It is worth around 11% of our national output. It generates more than £110 billion in tax revenues, which is more than any other single sector. Put another way, it funds more than half the cost of running the NHS. Whatever one’s interest in financial services, from a fiscal perspective alone they simply cannot be ignored. The sector is also thriving today in very challenging circumstances. The City think-tank Z/Yen tracks the competitiveness of global financial service hubs. In 2020, London trailed New York. Now it has caught back up. It remains the world’s premier centre for foreign exchange and specialist insurance. It helps to make the UK the world’s second largest services exporter. When I was Chancellor, I introduced the Edinburgh and Mansion House reforms to support this important sector. Regulations, including listing rules, were simplified and the mighty task of making our pension fund industry fit for purpose was started. To their credit, this Government have built on those reforms with the Leeds reforms, the Pension Schemes Act 2026 and the forthcoming Financial Services and Markets Bill, all of which are extremely welcome. But, as the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley said, our competitors are not standing still. With smart policies, our financial services sector could do even more for growth in the UK. Easy access to finance, alongside having the most respected universities in the world outside the United States, has helped to create, for example, the world’s third-largest tech ecosystem. In artificial intelligence, the UK has the potential to be the world’s next silicon valley. If we get there, easy access to finance will have played a major role in making that possible. What needs to happen next? The first thing is to do no harm—in particular, to do no harm with additional taxes in October’s Budget that could potentially damage the sector. Uniquely, the UK already charges higher corporation tax to banks. Total bank taxes are about 45% here, compared with 32% in Dublin and 28% in New York. I totally understand the temptation—finances are extremely tight, and the banks have few friends—but international capital is mobile, and hiking taxes further will mean that the sector ultimately generates less tax revenue, not more, for the Chancellor. Secondly, we need to make regulation in UK financial services more proportionate. Consumer protection really matters, but we cannot eliminate all risk, which is what our regulators sometimes appear to be trying to do. Compliance now costs the sector more than £39 billion a year—about 13% of operating costs. We should aim to at least halve that using the new international competitiveness and growth objectives, which the Financial Conduct Authority should apply to authorisation, supervision and enforcement decisions.

• 14 Jul 2026 · Public Office (Accountability) Bill · Hansard source

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  I will speak to two amendments, but first, I pay tribute to the Hillsborough families, and to two people in particular, with whom I have dealt personally. The first is Margaret Aspinall. As a new Culture Secretary in 2010, I made some ill-chosen comments about the Hillsborough tragedy, and I met Margaret Aspinall afterwards. I apologised, and she graciously accepted that apology. I have always been struck by not just her tenacity, but her dignity and decency. Today has been a long journey, but if the Bill saves lives, as we all want it to, she will deserve more credit than any politician, as will every one of the families of the 97. I also want to mention Bishop James Jones, who was chair of the independent panel. He gave the world the phrase that summed up more than any other what went wrong: the patronising disposition of unaccountable power. What is remarkable about Bishop James is that he did not hang up his hat after publishing the report in 2012, but went on to advise successive Home Secretaries on how to implement his recommendations, and then chaired the Hillsborough families’ experiences review panel. I asked for his help in chairing the Gosport independent panel, and he went on to chair the Gosport family forum, from which he has just stepped down for health reasons. To me, he exemplifies Senator John McCain’s famous words about “the honor we earn and the love we give if at a moment in our lives we sacrifice for something greater than self-interest.” I know that the whole House will want to mark his public service. Let me turn to my new clause and amendment. New clause 11 addresses a profound failure in the way that the duty of candour works in the NHS. In 2014, I put in place the regulations that applied that duty to the NHS, and when I tell the House what those regulations require of the NHS, Members will immediately see why they are failing so badly. They state that if severe harm or death is caused to a patient, the hospital must tell the patient or their family promptly, or as soon as is practically reasonable. It must give a truthful account of what is known and what happened, and it must offer a sincere apology. As witnesses to countless subsequent inquiries affecting the constituents of many Members here have said, that simply does not happen. Families have to fight for years to find the truth about what happened to a loved one, and all too often, they find that mistakes are ignored or covered up. When a tragedy is covered up, it is then repeated time after time, which is precisely what those families are campaigning to stop. Why do those cover-ups happen? There are many reasons, but one in particular is that trust lawyers advise trusts not to say anything at all when there is a risk of legal action. Let me tell the House about baby Ben Condon, who died at eight weeks old in 2015, when I was Health Secretary, after delays in giving him antibiotics. His father Allyn says that consultants apologised to him privately, saying that they had got it wrong, and then said the exact opposite at an inquest a few months later. I believe that that was a breach of the duty of candour regulations that were already in place, and that lawyers, even today, are giving unlawful advice to clinicians and trusts. As a result, the duty of candour in the NHS is being widely bypassed, and that will continue until we deal with this loophole. New clause 11 requires the Department of Health and Social Care “to ensure that legal services provided to NHS bodies…are consistent with the statutory duty of candour and the principles of openness”. It requires the Department or designated body to ensure that those standards are met, and that the situation be dealt with appropriately when they are not. Amendment 150 does a different job. The Bill requires people working for public bodies to tell the truth to those conducting investigations or reviews, but it does not require them to tell the truth to families, who then have to wait, often for years, until the review is published. The amendment requires that information to be provided to a person or family who has, or may have been, harmed. I recognise that the House will not divide on either the new clause or the amendment, so neither will become law as part of this Bill. My request to Ministers is that they include them in the Health Bill; they would be in scope, and would have a dramatic impact in preventing the anger of NHS-bereaved families, which is absolutely the equal of the anger of the Hillsborough families that we are trying to address today. My reason for wanting to do that is straightforward. A Health Secretary can pass new laws, introduce new technology and bring down waiting lists, but the only real change that stands the test of time is culture change. Culture change means replacing cover-ups, buck-passing and a blame culture with openness, trust and learning, but there will not be trust if patients and families are not told the truth. We will never learn from mistakes if we cover them up. We need real change—culture change—to put that right.

• 14 Jul 2026 · NHS Accountability · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State knows of my concern about the lack of accountability to bereaved parents, because trust lawyers advise trusts to ignore their duty of candour when there is the prospect of legal action. I was hoping to get this addressed through an amendment to the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, but it looks like that amendment will not be voted on. Will the Secretary of State address this issue in the Health Bill so that parents know that they can be sure that trusts will always tell the truth after a tragedy?

• 6 Jul 2026 · Patient Safety Review · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that one of the common themes in all the maternity scandals that we have been discussing in recent weeks, sadly, has been how a blame culture in the NHS makes it hard for NHS staff to speak openly about why tragedies have happened, and that that is why they welcome HSSIB, with its safe space protections? Is he worried that that could be undermined by putting HSSIB into the Care Quality Commission, which has a legal duty to act on information it receives, therefore creating the worry for people talking to HSSIB that the information that they give to it may no longer be protected in the same way?