The NHS is the Conservative Achilles heel

Yesterday’s efforts by the Tories to use the terrible failings at Stafford Hospital to score political points was a low point, even for this Government.

The NHS is the Conservative Achilles heel. David Cameron knows this and it explains why he and his MPs are now using the Stafford tragedy to discredit the NHS as a whole. They want to claim that the NHS culture is rotten everywhere. It is wrong and unfair on NHS staff.

In the last decade, the NHS made huge progress. In 2010, it had the lowest-ever waiting lists and the highest-ever patient satisfaction. That represented a huge turn-around from the NHS of the 1990s and was achieved through the hard work and dedication of people at every level of the system.

But we accept that things were not right everywhere. As Robert Francis said in his report, the failings at Stafford were the primarily the responsibility of the local board. He pointed to wider lessons for everyone. I am taking these on board but I will not stand by and let people who have never believed in the NHS use this moment to run it down as a precursor to privatisation. It is no coincidence that, at the very same time as Tories have been undermining the NHS, they were also bringing forward regulations to privatise it by the back door. We stopped that and I will continue to point out that the privatisation the Conservative Party seeks will intensify the risks to patient care and change the culture immeasurably for the worse.

Yesterday’s attack was predicated on a number of false claims. Far from being silent, when the failings first came to light in 2008, Alan Johnson and Gordon Brown both apologised to the people of Stafford. I did the same in 2009 and Ed Miliband repeated it when the Francis report was published last month.

Just last week at Health Questions, I raised the Francis Report and asked if the Government would agree with us and accept his recommendations on minimum staffing numbers on the ward. The silence was from the other side of the House.

The reason these recommendations are so important is that they are not new. When the first Francis Report was published in 2010, it was clear that the hospital’s cuts to staffing were critical in what had gone wrong. This was at a time when the Labour Government was increasing nurse numbers. Yet now, on David Cameron’s watch, we are seeing reports from the CQC that 16% of hospitals in England have inadequate staffing levels. Thousands of nursing jobs have been cut as the NHS struggles with the biggest ever back-office reorganisation in its history. The NHS is at risk today and this is where the Prime Minister’s focus ought to be.

In their desperation to launch a political attack, the Tories seem to have conveniently forgotten that it was my personal decision, two months after being appointed Secretary of State, to bring in Robert Francis QC to conduct the first independent inquiry. I did this because I wanted to get quickly to the truth without distracting the hospital from the essential task of making immediate improvements.

It is now a real cause for concern that, three years on, Jeremy Hunt is about to decide on whether Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust is to be placed into administration and broken up. After all they have been through, it would not be fair on the people of Stafford if the result of all of this was that they were to lose their hospital. Rather than playing political games, Ministers should be focusing on what matters: saving a safe and sustainable hospital for the people of Stafford.

Next week, there is a debate in the House of Commons on openness and transparency in the NHS. We will lead that debate for Labour. We will face up to the things that went wrong and the wider lessons we must learn, as well as accounting for the decisions I took as Health Secretary. But I will also defend the NHS from this political attack. I will not stand by and allow its age-old critics from the Right to use this moment to undermine the NHS and the nursing profession as a whole.

On Thursday, we will remind the Commons of the distance the NHS travelled between 1997, when people were waiting years on NHS waiting lists, and 2010, when public satisfaction with the NHS was at an all-time high. We will remind the House that it was Labour which gave NHS whistleblowers the first ever legal protection in 1998 and the first independent regulation of care standards. We will remind it that it was Labour which ordered a revolution in the publication of clinical data following the Bristol heart scandal.

And I will remind the country that the greatest threat the NHS faces right now is a Government whose only prescription for it is the toxic medicine of cuts, re-organisation and privatisation.

Andy Burnham is the Shadow Health Secretary and former Health Secretary