Andrew George invites Prime Minister to Health debate

Following remarks by the Prime Minister in today’s Western Morning News, West Cornwall MP, Andrew George, has invited the Prime Minister to attend the public meeting he has called in Penzance on the Health and Social Care Bill.

Mr George has called the meeting because of continuing concern that the Bill would undermine the NHS and create a health system driven more by profit than by concern about patient care.

In his remarks today, Mr Cameron says that he believed “that the whole health profession is on board” with the Bill. But Mr George has pointed out that with the British Medical Association, the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Nursing and other key stakeholders calling for the Bill to be withdrawn the Prime Minister may be deluding himself!

Mr George said, “We both signed up to a Coalition Agreement which promised to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that had got in the way of patient care’, but this is the biggest reorganisation since the NHS was created. Leading clinician bodies have called for the Bill to be scrapped.

“I have repeatedly invited the Secretary of State – Andrew Lansley – to either come himself or to send a representative to my public meeting to defend the Government’s proposals, but I have received nothing.

“This is not what we signed up for in the Coalition Agreement. I will be urging my Liberal Democrat colleagues – and those Conservatives who really care about the NHS – to oppose the Bill when we debate it in the Commons in a couple of weeks’ time.”