Speeches by Hatton.

“It is a pleasure to be before this Committee once again to make the case for such an important debate for parliamentarians. The main reason why we have brought this forward is the Riverscapes Partnership, which is made up of around 40 leading charities and organisations, including the National Trust, the River Trust, t…”

“As I have made clear in this Chamber on numerous occasions, in my part of the world there are sadly far too few specialist school places for children with SEND. Headteachers across Weymouth and Portland have made clear to me that only with a new special school will we be able to deal with this problem. Given the urgent…”

“Q8. For the past year, I have been campaigning for a new special educational needs and disabilities school to open at the Osprey Quay site on Portland. There are far too few specialist school places for children with SEND in my part of the world, so local families urgently need to see that school open its doors. A new …”

“I appreciate that that work is happening now. It would be useful for the Committee to know whether, having not met the March 2025 timeframe by which you wanted to reach the target, there is a fixed projection for when the NHS is likely to meet the target of 5%.”

“So there will be a fresh date published next year for when we meet this 5% target. There is not one right now, but one will be published next year.”

“Just building on that, if you could give us a bit more detail, with the loss of NHS England and it all being run from the Department, will there be that ability to reach out and engage in a clinical setting with those areas that perhaps are struggling most to meet their performance targets, particularly in terms of mee…”

“That leads me quite nicely to where I wanted to go next in terms of questions. A theme that has come through in today’s session, which many members of the Committee have picked up, is that there have been some areas where, when there has been a transformation programme with significant additional resource and funding, …”

“We are going to see this huge change, with the abolition of NHS England and a lot of the duplicated work that it did subsumed into the Department of Health and Social Care. Can you explain how we can make sure, with that huge process taking place over the next couple of years, that we meet those recovery targets at the…”

“There is just one final question from me. Again, it would be really helpful to understand what the thinking is at a time of significant change in the NHS with the 10-year plan and the abolition of NHS England. Figure 4 in the NAO Report shows that meeting the 5% target by March 2025 did not happen. When do we project t…”

“You do not think anyone could have moved more quickly or more efficiently, whether that is a Minister, the wider Department of Health and Social Care, or indeed NHS England?”

“Yes, diagnostic waiting time performance.”

“On that point quickly, Sir Jim, looking at the chart in the NAO Report, which looks at where we are in terms of meeting that 5% recovery target, do you see it as flatlining or do you think we will see a significant drop in the short to medium term? Is it going to keep stubbornly remaining around 20%?”

“Building on what you have shared with us today, at the moment the vast majority of diagnostic tests do not happen in a CDC. They happen elsewhere, in an acute hospital. If we are to drive down and meet that 5% recovery target, do you see CDCs as playing a much larger role, not just over the next year or so but longer t…”

“Particularly in my constituency, I have a community diagnostic centre in Weymouth Community Hospital. I am pretty certain that it is one of the ones that is operating seven days a week. It is leading to certainly much higher patient satisfaction and I think GPs like the way it works as well. Moving on, I suppose my con…”

“I have one very final point on that. In terms of being able to do that from a cost point of view, delivering it close to the patient often will not be cheaper, particularly in rural and coastal areas such as mine, where there is a very sparsely populated community. A lot of people are a long way away from a larger hosp…”

“I would like to start with community diagnostic centres, which in some ways have been a success story in the way that they have delivered tests and scans for patients closer to home rather than further up the road at an acute hospital. Could you set out, Sir Jim, where you feel there has been a success in building up t…”

“Looking at the mistakes that were made there, how do you think NHS England could have done things differently to ensure that we got closer to, or better still actually met, that key 95% recovery target?”

“To press that point again that the Chair rightly made, with things as routine as a blood test, when you are looking at rural and coastal areas where public transport is not great, the journeys that patients are making are often ridiculous, particularly in my part of the world, where someone might be travelling in exces…”

“In paragraph 2.10 of the NAO Report, there is an explanation or something as to why there was that shortfall of 3.6 million diagnostic tests. One of the problems pointed out is ministerial delays. Could you go into a bit more detail as to what those ministerial delays actually were?”

“So the MOD is confident that it will be able to be successful here and complete that relocation for everybody who wants to. Could you give us a bit of detail there? Could you then explain to the Committee whether there have been any obstacles to this being a successful roll‑out up until now, and what work the MO…”