ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, the Chancellor will pledge another £2 billion for the NHS this week and GP services will be bolstered by another £1.1 billion from banking fines.  Well just last week Labour proposed something pretty similar so is the government stealing their message on the National Health Service and is even this multi million pound boost enough to make a difference?  Well the Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, joins me now from his constituency in Leigh in Lancashire, a very good morning to you Mr Burnham.  Now I would call this almost NHS top trumps but it’s too important for that but the fact is the Conservatives have beaten your offering.

ANDY BURNHAM: Not at all, Dermot.  It’s good, I should say this at the beginning, that George Osborne at last recognises how serious the problems are in the National Health Service but of course the money he’s announced won’t do anything to reduce the pressure this winter and you’ve been reporting this weekend on the very real crisis we have in mental health at the moment, A&E around England is under intense pressure and people are struggling to get GP appointments and none of this will help with any of that.  But he has recognised that the NHS will need more money in the next parliament, so has Labour but we’ve gone much further, we’ve announced money additional to what he has said and that will be needed to implement the Stephens Plan at the Chancellor has referred to.

DM: Additional?  Why will more Conservative money not do the same things that Labour money would, why wouldn’t it make a difference?  Of course it would and it’s more money than we’ve heard coming from your party.  

ANDY BURNHAM: It will make a difference, I said that at the beginning, he’s recognised how serious the problems are in the NHS and I’ve come on your programme many times over recent years saying it’s because of the problems that he has created, that reorganisation that has dragged the NHS down and left it in the very fragile position that it’s in today so of course more money will help but it won’t solve the problems that I’ve been describing.  The crisis in the NHS is very real indeed and this money will help but it will be nowhere near enough.  Simon Stephens has talked about much more being needed by the end of the next parliament to put the NHS where it needs to be and Labour has identified part of that money.  We have brought forward proposals that the Conservatives won’t do for a mansions tax, a tax on tobacco companies and closing tax loopholes and that is in the end the big debate at the coming election. The Conservatives have prioritised tax cuts for higher earners, Labour is saying our priority is the National Health Service and that is the very big choice coming at the forthcoming general election.  

DM: Apart from the fact that Mr Osborne has pledged that two billion and it will go in every year.  So you mentioned Simon Stephens, the head of the NHS in England, he wants over the next parliament an £8 billion funding boost, 1.5% increase in real terms every year, is that Labour’s pledged?

ANDY BURNHAM: No, Labour’s pledge is to put an additional £2.5 billion a year alongside full integration of health and social care and I just want to make this point, Dermot, because I think it’s very, very important.  The Chancellor always talks about the NHS in isolation as if you can give money to the NHS on its own and everything will be fine.  What we’ve seen in this parliament are these very severe cuts to social care have had a devastating impact on the NHS, it’s because people can’t be discharged home from hospital in a timely manner that hospitals are becoming increasingly dysfunctional.  We’ve got thousands of older people trapped in hospital when they are well enough to go home and this is the flaw in the Chancellor’s thinking.  He thinks it’s okay to inflict big cuts on other government departments but leave the NHS protected in isolation.  I’m afraid that the flaw in that thinking has been exposed in this parliament.  

DM: Okay, let’s add in mental health care, you touched on that, the experience of that poor young woman, the 16 year old in Devon with severe mental health problems who ended up in a police cell for a couple of nights, presumably that would be part of the integration you would like to see as well.  

ANDY BURNHAM: Oh absolutely Dermot, I think it is a very, very serious situation and put party politics aside here, this needs to be addressed right now, this winter because we cannot have young people waiting for beds in police cells when they need to be in hospital.  This is put to me all the time that there are people travelling the country, hundreds of miles, in search of a bed.  This really is not good enough and we heard a report a few days ago that seven people had died actually while waiting for a bed.  The crisis in mental health is happening right now and the government needs to bring forward a plan to give immediate support to services and I think we need to hear a statement from them in the next day or two about what they are going to do to help mental health services right now.

DM: Okay, so put yourself, you are coming in to government as the next health secretary, you have just criticised and have criticised consistently over the course of this parliament the existing government’s reorganisation of the National Health Service yet you are standing there telling me we need to integrate mental health care, social care, acute care, that’s a huge reorganisation.  

ANDY BURNHAM: No, I’m very clear that I’ve said all along that we will work with the organisations that we inherit, unlike this government, but services do need to change.  You mentioned mental health, it is still separate to the rest of the NHS and often people in the mental health system find that their physical health is neglected so we do need to see that kind of integration of services but it has to be done, services have to be changed without another reorganisation and I’ve been very clear about that all along.  Look, the money that has been announced today is welcome, let there be no doubt about it, but remember Dermot, this reorganisation that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister brought forward has taken £3 billion out of the NHS frontline and the NHS is expecting to be in deficit this year so this money isn’t going to solve everything, there are very big problems facing the NHS in the next parliament, it needs both a plan for the NHS, a vision for it, and that’s our vision around integration, and the extra money to make it a reality and only the Labour party has brought forward both the plan and the funding to back it up.

DM: And, as you said, you have bought into a lot of Simon Stephen’s plan, he has been looking ahead.  One of the big parts, reading his comments, one of the big parts is dealing with unhealthy lifestyles, money that can be saved by dealing with things like obesity and he is a big fan, because he went through one himself, of the incentives to lose weight.  He said he lost a lot of weight when he worked in the United States because there were incentives there, can you see the NHS bringing in cash payments from NHS funds to encourage people to lose weight?

ANDY BURNHAM: I’m not sure about that, Dermot, but certainly radical action in this area, absolutely.  I think it is very refreshing actually that Simon Stephens did highlight prevention and talk more seriously about prevention than perhaps we’ve seen NHS leaders do before because he is absolutely right, that has to be part of our overall plan to make the NHS sustainable.  Personally I would like to look more at exercise and physical activity, making referral for physical activity available in all GP surgeries because I think if people become more physically active then they get control over what they’re eating and what they’re drinking and all the other things. I think also the time has come to look at the food industry.  I’ve said many times I just cannot defend the amount of sugar that children are eating, we’ve seen more and more sugar built into our food over time and I’m looking there at a mandatory maximum limit on fat, salt and sugar in children’s food because the status quo simply isn’t working, we need to consider more radical action.

DM: And back to the here and now, the beauty of Twitter, we’ve just to Simon Stephens on Twitter saying that the money he’s heard from George Osborne is a massive vote of confidence in the NHS’s own five year plan.  

ANDY BURNHAM: Well it certainly is welcome, I’ve said that throughout this interview.  More money is urgently needed, the NHS simply will not cope if we didn’t have it, it’s very close to collapse, Dermot and I think the important thing is to look at the reality of what is happening in the NHS right now.  We have got hospital A&E’s missing the government target for over 70 weeks in a row, now A&E is the barometer of the system and that is telling us that this NHS right now is in very severe difficulties and that is what the government should be dealing with now.  

DM: Quick question on A&E, you were very critical of the Health Secretary when he told the House of Commons that he had had to take his own children, or believed that it was right to take his own children to an A&E department because he didn’t think he could get a GPs appointment quickly enough.  We’ve all got young children, have you done that yourself?

ANDY BURNHAM: No, I used to use NHS Direct all the time, it used to be very good at providing that reassurance and my criticism of them is why did they scrap NHS Direct and replace it with 111?  Also Walk In centres have closed, they are a very useful alternative to A&E for parents, you can’t have the Health Secretary, Dermot, saying that A&E can be used on demand if you can’t get a GP appointment, that is not the official government advice to the public and to have the Health Secretary in the Commons kind of just say oh it doesn’t matter, just go to A&E, I’m afraid A&E staff would not have welcomed that statement particularly when they are on the brink now of a very dangerous winter indeed.   

DM: So you’ve never done that?  

ANDY BURNHAM: No, I’ve not done that, I wouldn’t do that.  A&E is for very dangerous situations and not just because people can’t get GP appointments and my God, doesn’t it stick in the throat really to have a government minister saying that when they have made it harder and harder for people to get GP appointments.  It really, for me anyway, brought out the sheer hypocrisy of these ministers.  

DM: Okay, Mr Burnham, thank you very much indeed.  Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham there in Leigh.  

ANDY BURNHAM:  Thank you.