Peter Prinsley MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Since I have been an MP, I have visited a number of schools in my constituency, and I have always been struck by the number of children who are carers. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I think that is a very under-recognised group of people, whose lives are completely dominated by the fact that they are carers for their parents.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  My wife is an educational psychologist, so I have lived this, in a vicarious fashion, for the last 30 years or more. I understand how the system for special educational needs has evolved, particularly the role of the psychological services and how children are supported. As a result of a series of reforms, in particular during the years of austerity, the services provided by local authorities to schools—particularly the schools’ psychological services—became much more focused on psychologists providing reports to inform the distribution of resources, and much less focused on educational psychologists actually being in schools supporting children. I would like to see a change, such that educational psychologists and their expertise are back in schools, in classrooms, supporting teachers. Time and again when I visit schools, they say, “Let’s get educational psychology support back into schools.” I think that is something my wife would support.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Much of the conversation around those trade deals relates to pharmaceuticals from the United States. Our patients should be able to access the best available treatments, whatever deals we cook up. We must support innovative research based in our own country, particularly clinical trials for new medicines. To do that, we need to support clinical academics—the doctors who work in universities and organise research. Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that the number of clinical academics fell under the previous Conservative Administration? Most clinical academics are now very senior, and we are not recruiting replacements effectively. We need to look after our home-grown pharmaceutical industry so that we do not need such trade deals.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Would the hon. Member comment on what I consider to be almost the most successful and important Bill that our new Government have passed, on the effective abolition of cigarette smoking? As time goes by, that will save more lives than anything else we could possibly think of. I recognise that it was the initiative of the previous Government, but the fact that the new Government have managed to get it over the line is a massive achievement. That is very much underappreciated and certainly not spoken about anything like enough. We will never do anything as important as the abolition of cigarette smoking.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I sit on the Home Affairs Committee, and we have lately been discussing the matter of serious organised crime, and vape shops in particular. It turns out that many of the vape shops are in fact not really shops; they are places for laundering money. Specifically, they launder money in relation to drug businesses and the drug trade, which is another huge public health matter that I am sure the Minister will agree needs to be dealt with. We were informed that about 10% of this country’s adult population are using illicit drugs, and that for the most part those are being delivered via the post office. Does the Minister agree that that is a massive public health issue that will also need to be urgently addressed?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister acknowledge that the uplift in the carer’s earnings allowance is a very significant measure that this Government did introduce?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Public health used to be clearly under the aegis of the national health service. Some years ago, public health officers became employees of the local authorities, and the thing became somewhat separated from the NHS. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must join public health more closely to the activities of the national health service? Public health was at the very foundations of the national health service. I do not know whether other Members have, like me, read A. J. Cronin’s famous book, “The Citadel”, which describes the health service’s origins; in fact, I understand it was the book that the original politicians had all read. It has a marvellous description of a typhus epidemic, caused by an infected drain running down the middle of a street in a little Welsh mining village. The doctors had been completely unable to get any of the authorities to deal with it, so one night—they were ex-military—they put a little dynamite in the drain and blew the whole thing up. That is well described in the book, and it just shows how public health was absolutely integrated into the foundational principles of the national health service.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fifteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Although it is true that hospital management could concentrate on dealing with the waits in A&E, surely it needs to concentrate on the flow through the entire hospital. Every department and everybody involved in the hospital has to be thinking all the time about the flow through the entire hospital. That involves having a pharmacy that is open at night and ensuring that social workers are there when they need to be—it involves all manner of things. Simply concentrating on a particular statistic in an A&E department will not actually deal with the problem.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I think the principal reduction that the right hon. Member for Melton and Syston described was a result of the change of practice in the way that psychiatry was managed. During that period, we closed the asylums—large hospitals on the outskirts of almost every town and city. That was the result of a change in clinical practice—the idea that patients should be managed within the community. However, we continued to close acute beds, and it is the acute beds in the district general hospitals that are the problem we are talking about.

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  When I was a young doctor—a registrar—in the 1980s, we had 300,000 beds in our health service. By the time I was a senior doctor in the 2020s, we had 140,00 beds—less than half the number of beds we had before. When I was a young doctor, corridor care did not exist; I had never heard the term. The hospitals were simply big enough. Does the hon. Member agree that the many years of decline in the total number of beds in our hospitals is an extremely important factor in the fact that we do not have enough beds for the patients sitting in the A&E departments?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  On the publication of data on avoidable deaths, new clause 84 states “where waits of more than 12 hours in accident and emergency departments was a contributory factor.” Does the right hon. Member consider it likely that there is any great accuracy in the assessment of whether a death was avoidable?

• 9 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I wonder whether the hon. Member remembers that in 2010, when I believe there was an election— [ Interruption. ] Yes. The point I wish to make is that at the end of the previous Conservative Government, before Labour came back into office, waiting lists had reached an absolute record. Under the previous Labour Administration, waiting lists came down to almost nothing, but after 2010 they crept up and up, and by the time of the election in 2024 they had reached a record. I think she will recognise that Labour Governments have had strong records of reducing waiting lists, which is what we are doing now. We are only getting started, but it would be good to have some words of encouragement.

• 8 Jul 2026 · NHS Corridor Care · Hansard source

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  It is true: I am another doctor. I qualified in 1982, probably long before my distinguished colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), was even born. I thank her very much for securing this important debate. For context, when I was a registrar in 1988, the NHS had 300,000 beds, but by the time I was a senior consultant in 2020, we had 140,000 beds—less than half the beds we had when I was a registrar. I recall how the Northern general hospital in Sheffield had rows of Nightingale wards with crisp, white linen stretching as far as the eye could see down to the end of the ward. There were always beds. There was no such thing as corridor care. To echo what the distinguished GP, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) said, if an elderly woman goes off her legs at five o’clock on a Friday evening in February, the family will call the GP. The answerphone will say “Dial 111”, the call handler will triage her and advise ringing 999, and that woman will arrive at A&E at 9 o’clock in the evening, be seen at 1 in the morning and be admitted, because that is what happens if someone is seen at 1 in the morning. If we had a functioning community health service, with more neighbourhood health services, the patient would probably have been visited by a GP, perhaps until 10 o’clock at night. The diagnosis of a urinary tract infection would have been made, the patient would have been given an antibiotic and somebody would have come to see them in the morning, and they would have been a lot better by then and would never have been admitted. We can definitely reduce admissions if we think more carefully about how we treat patients in the community. “Corridor care” is an oxymoron. There should be no corridor care. As we have heard, it happens when patients arriving in A&E overwhelm the available cubicles and rooms and the wards have no beds, and we know that patients are sent to A&E because the GP system simply cannot cope. I understand that the APPG on emergency care found that 20% of major emergency departments had patients being cared for on trolleys or in chairs in corridors. Almost 80% of clinical leads also said that patients were being harmed by corridor care. My son is an A&E doctor, who is presently in London. He texted me shortly after I was elected: “Dad, bring the Health Secretary here right now so that he can see what is going on.” There were queues of trollies and patients waiting in ambulances, and trollies in the car park. We know that many patients come to serious harm while waiting. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, A&E means accident and emergency; that is what it is for. At West Suffolk hospital in my constituency, Dr Cameron, the chief executive, said that corridor care had been “sorted out” through a whole-hospital approach, with everyone thinking about patient flow, planning discharge early and involving social services, allied health professionals and pharmacy. West Suffolk hospital simply refused to accept that corridor care was inevitable. I believe that we should take the best of those ideas to the rest of the NHS.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  What we are talking about is not so much the safety of staff when they come forward, but the safety of patients, and whether we genuinely believe that the proposed modification to the arrangement will improve patient safety. That is the underlying point. Although the safety of staff is important, it is the safety of patients that we must bear in mind.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. The question is what will make patients more safe. Does incorporating the department that looks at safety into the organisation that inspects the services help? It might. Safety is not an add-on; safety must be at the heart of absolutely everything that we do. Safety is not a separate matter; it depends on those who work in our NHS and all of us all the time. That must be the culture. Let us not rely so much on inspections and litigations. At a time when we are unable to find jobs for newly qualified midwives, we spend more on obstetric litigation and compensation than we spend on obstetrics. I applaud what our Government are trying to do and their intention to improve things.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Is it the hon. Member’s belief that that is something that Healthwatch would have been able to deal with, support and prevent?

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I listened carefully to what the Minister said about a change of culture. A change of culture can certainly happen. In the surgical world, we used to bring patients into the operating theatre, check that the patient was on the operating table and do the operation. Sometimes, we operated on the wrong patient and on the wrong part of the body. We then introduced the World Health Organisation checklist, which checked absolutely everything before we started. It was a complete change of culture in the operating department. We made sure that we had the right prosthesis, the right patient and that we were operating on the right part of the patient. Now, the WHO checklist is a universally adopted process. I am absolutely sure that the culture in the health service can change.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  rose —

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak to new clause 74 on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger), who is in the Gallery, and also to some extent on behalf of my predecessor, Jo Churchill, who was the Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket before me, and was also a Health Minister. This is about Healthwatch and the patient voice. The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby suggests that the Secretary of State create an impact report within 12 months of the Bill passing through Parliament to assess what the impact of the amalgamation or integration of the functions of Healthwatch into the ICB would in fact be, and in particular look at the effectiveness of the complaints procedure and the way in which complaints were responded to. The theme is also that which we spoke about this morning on whether an organisation can successfully interrogate itself. I believe that with the appropriate safeguards it probably could, but I do think that the suggestion that there ought to be a formal report on the impact within 12 months is something worth considering.

• 7 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Thirteenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member for taking my intervention and I am sorry that it is late in the afternoon. The question we are faced with is this: what is the best system to serve our patients? If the best system turns out to be a system that is procured from another country, would he in principle always object to that?

• 6 Jul 2026 · Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems · Hansard source

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  In 1914 we were producing 12 Vickers machine guns a week; by 1918, we were producing 1,200. Warfighting depends not only on the bravery of our armed forces, but on the technical innovation of our manufacturers. In Suffolk we now have advanced drone manufacturers. Does the Minister agree that we must always be ready for the next war?