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12 April 2014updated 24 Jun 2021 1:01pm

The Tories’ attacks on the Welsh NHS have been exposed as baseless

A new report calmly and authoritatively shows that there is no significant difference in the performance of the four UK health systems.

By Owen Smith

When David Cameron was first elected Prime Minister he came to Wales and pledged “a new respect” agenda, promising collaboration and partnership between the devolved Welsh Government and his own. Yesterday, he returned to Wales to address the dwindling band of Welsh Tory faithful at their annual conference and spectacularly broke that promise.

In a vitriolic speech that demeans the office of Prime Minister, Cameron described Offa’s Dyke, the divide between England and Wales, as “a border between life and death”.  Even the Western Mail (the Welsh daily once described by Nye Bevan as a Tory rag and the Coalowner’s Gazette) marvels at language from the Prime Minister that would be more suitable “to describe a criminal atrocity or a natural disaster”.  They concluded that “politically motivated scaremongering is intolerable…the battle for votes in England can never justify terrifying a grandmother in Wales on the eve of a hip operation.”

Sadly, this sordid intervention by Cameron is a new low in a long campaign the Conservative Party have been orchestrating to smear the NHS in Wales. Jeremy Hunt did exactly the same in his conference speech yesterday and even the Secretary of State for Wales, David Jones, has been using any opportunity to whip up fear by criticising key Welsh public services. The Conservative chairman Grant Shapps even went as far as openly stating that his party were going to target Wales as part of their general election strategy.

But what is most galling and insulting about this grubby strategy of targeting the Welsh NHS is that it is unquestionably based on a lie. On the very day this speech was being made, leading health academics at the Nuffield Trust, published a report based on over a decade’s worth of data, which made it crystal clear that “no one country is emerging as a consistent front-runner on health system performance”. 

In the face of Cameron’s claims of a crumbling NHS in Wales, the weighty report ‘The four health systems of the UK: How do they compare?’ calmly and authoritatively showed beyond question that while each of the four nations have particular strengths and weaknesses, none of them is consistently ahead. In doing so, the report dealt a significant blow to the Tory election strategy. Perhaps most importantly, it also points to the fact that “there have been significant improvements in the performance of the four UK health systems over the past two decades”. Showing the Conservative claims of a health service in meltdown are groundless. The Tories’ fox has not only been shot, but stuffed and mounted as well.

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The report does say – as with everywhere in the UK – that there are challenges to be addressed. Over the period it looked at, waiting times for certain procedures, such as knee operations, rose as austerity set in. But the latest information shows that the standard waiting time for an orthopaedic procedure in Wales is 15 weeks – this is less than the Welsh Government’s target of 26 weeks. This is despite Wales managing budget cuts from UK government of £1.7bn and the fact we have the oldest population of the four home nations.

Nevertheless, extra investments have been made since the period covered by the report to tackle waiting times, including an extra £63m for orthopaedic surgery, and overall health spending per head still remains higher in Wales than England – showing the Welsh Government’s commitment to the NHS. All Welsh Labour politicians realise that we are custodians for the NHS, the most treasured institution in Wales. Ours is the country and party of its founder Nye Bevan – no one is more proud of our NHS than the Welsh people. That is why it has been so galling to see the Prime Minister and others make attacks on the NHS in Wales, which have been proven beyond doubt to be groundless.

Yet for all their negativity, the Conservatives have had little positive breakthrough with the public.  A recent YouGov poll showed just 14 per cent of Welsh people trust the Tories with the NHS, perhaps too many of us remember when they were last in charge in Wales, with crumbling hospitals and people being forced to wait two years for operations. Far from genuine concern for the health of ordinary people, this smear campaign is a smokescreen to distract from David Cameron’s handling of the NHS in England where he has caused an A&E crisis and wasted £3bn on a pointless reorganisation.

So my message to the Tory high command is as clear as the Nuffield Trust’s report – if you want to fight the next election on the health service, be our guest.  Nationally, Labour saved a crumbling health service in 1997 and in Wales we continue to run an excellent and improving service, true to the NHS’s core values of putting people before profit.

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