My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Ulster (Mr. Dunlop) referred to the Crisis in the Health Service.

The Crisis in the Health Service - at £8,000 million a year - means that the Service is dragging its feet in the development of new techniques in medicine.

There is a Crisis in the Health Service and something needs to be done.

It is there that the Crisis in the Health Service can be seen most vividly.

Unfortunately, it has and once more we have a Crisis in the Health Service in Nottingham and even at this late stage I feel that I must impress upon the Minister the gravity of the situation.

I hope that the opportunity to reply to the debate will be used not to score further points off the trade unions, but to deal with the Crisis in the Health Service.

The record tells a different story' that we must consider when discussing the Crisis in the Health Service.

Both aspects are relatively unimportant in the context of the Crisis in the Health Service.

If we wish to understand the nature of the Crisis of the Health Service, and if a responsible Opposition wish to address themselves to the choices that have to be made, there has to be an essential basis of fact, accepted by both sides of the House.

The response to the Crisis in the Health Service has been to announce - behind an entirely fraudulent claim of a 0·5 per cent.

Instead of producing these complacent answers, why does not the Minister recognise that a major Crisis in the Health Service faces many of our communities?

He produced evidence showing that there was already a deep and serious Crisis in the Health Service on Merseyside.

Does the Secretary of State recognise that the people of Scotland are not persuaded by the continual juggling of figures by Conservative Members and that the real Crisis in the Health Service should be measured by the serious squeeze on services that people are experiencing and the lengthening dole queues of doctors and nurses?

In other words, the management will have precipitated a major Crisis in the Health Service locally and will still have gone barely halfway towards meeting the projected financial shortfall.

Is she aware that the disillusionment of nursing officers is creating a Crisis in the Health Service?

My hon. Friends are not present because they are meeting the chairman of the Mid Glamorgan area health authority to discuss the Crisis in the Health Service caused by the cuts imposed by the Government.

If, as I suspect will be the case, all those hon. Members who want to raise issues about the Health Service are unable to do so today, will the Leader of the House make Government time available because the Health Service Crisis must be responded to by Parliament.

Against a background of financial Crisis in the Health Service, it takes a thick-skinned and impervious Government to come to the House of Commons to ask it to pass a Bill that will further reduce Government spending on the National Health Service.

The Bill that contains them is doubly objectionable because it is a pathetic and fatuous irrelevance to the real Crisis in the Health Service.

Surely the Health Service Crisis is an example of the breakdown of democracy.

On 26 November, the day that the House was last debating the Crisis in the Health Service, the London Evening Standard reproduced an excellent report from London Health Emergency.

I hope that the House does not need to be reminded of the Crisis in Our Health Service.

I do not wish to rehearse too much the background to the Health Service Crisis which has so badly affected my constituency in the last six months, as that has already been done adequately through the diligence and eloquence of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe), whom I see in his place and who raised the issue in the House a few weeks ago.

affirms its commitment to the principle of a National Health Service providing comprehensive, free treatment to all citizens on the basis of need, not payment; further notes that current Treasury revenue substantially exceeds expenditure; and therefore calls upon Her Majesty's Government to release additional funds to end the financial Crisis in the Health Service, and to drop proposals for new charges for dental examinations and for eyesight tests.

I beg to move,That this House notes that two out of three health authorities anticipate a deficit at the end of the current financial year and that attempts to balance their accounts have produced closures of hospital wards and cancellation of operations; affirms its commitment to the principle of a National Health Service providing comprehensive, free treatment to all citizens on the basis of need, not payment; further notes that current Treasury revenue substantially exceeds expenditure; and therefore calls upon Her Majesty's Government to release additional funds to end the financial Crisis in the Health Service, and to drop proposals for new charges for dental examinations and for eyesight tests.

We have heard much in recent weeks, and today in the House and in the country at large, about the Crisis in the Health Service.

I should like to highlight one less-emphasised but equally important Crisis in the Health Service - the crisis caused by the implementation, not the principle, of the Resource Allocation Working Party proposals.

Since 1948, 40 years have passed and three things have happened which have led to the Crisis in the Health Service.

People know from their own experience and the experience of their friends and relatives that there is a Crisis in the Health Service.

Will he recognise that there is a Crisis in the Health Service and that the solution lies in the Government's hands?

They are able to complain about a Crisis in the Health Service only because they are unable to complain about a crisis anywhere else in the economy.

Despite the fine record of Health Service staff in treating more patients, the unpalatable fact for Conservative Members is that there are longer waiting lists and there is a Crisis in the Health Service.

Is it because the Secretary of State for Scotland is fearful to come before the massed ranks of the Opposition to debate the Crisis in the Health Service and in education in Scotland, not to mention the diversion of money from the important bypasses in my constituency to the A74, and many other issues?

Yet it is agreed by all who have examined the matter that there is a real and major Crisis in the Health Service.

I have spoken about my constituency problems and about unemployment in Wales, but we also have a Major Health Service Crisis.

I wish to speak about the Crisis in the Health Service in inner London, a subject which formed part of my speech in the equivalent debate last year.

The Government's policies have cynically and deliberately engineered a Crisis in the Health Service so that they can introduce market forces and further privatisation into our health system.

Is it not time that the Prime Minister, who is ultimately responsible for the balance of trade deficit, the Crisis in the Health Service, 4 million unemployed, despair, homelessness and poverty, was ordered to come to the House to give an account of her bankrupt stewardship to the nation?

An example is the way in which the Government have responded to the Crisis in the Health Service.

The Crisis in the Health Service is partly but not entirely of the Government's making.

Not long ago, the House was in the throes of a debate about the Health Service Crisis in response to the almost nightly scenes of young children, the elderly, and other seriously ill and chronically sick patients being refused admission to our hospitals and to the life-saving treatment that they desperately needed.

Inner London, particularly my district of Hackney in east London, will face a Health Service Crisis at Christmas.

When will the Secretary of State come clean about the Crisis in the Health Service in Lothian?

Can he reply specifically to the charge that the extent of the deficit means that there is now a Crisis in the Health Service in Midlothian, which will result in hospital closures and cuts in medical staff numbers?

There must be a resolution of the perpetual state of Crisis in the Health Service in Gwynedd.

Despite the platitudinous responses of the Leader of the House and of the Secretary of State for Health, there is a real Crisis in the Health Service in the county of Leicestershire, as evidenced by the recent decision by Leicester royal infirmary to close 10 per cent.

Why are the Government pursuing this path of Thatcherite dogma, instead of dealing with the financial Crisis in the Health Service?

Why is it that the two key debates next week - the one on the Crisis in the Health Service, and the one on the famine in Bangladesh and Africa and the problems facing the Kurds - have been arranged by us in Opposition time, and that the Government have arranged no major debates on national issues in Government time?

In 1987, when we last had a Crisis in the Health Service - not the worst for 30 years, as the British Medical Association described this one, but so serious that the last Prime Minister had to decide to demolish the whole NHS so that it could be dealt with - there were 100,000 fewer people on waiting lists, and children such as the one to whom my hon. Friend has referred were being admitted and dealt with before minor cases.

The Opposition motion refers to a Crisis in the Health Service, but in reality the debate is more about a crisis in the Labour party and the particular crisis facing the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett).

The question is how we can reverse the Crisis in the Health Service.

They talk about the growing Crisis in the Health Service, the commercialisation of the health service, concern at the total fragmentation of care due to underfunding, the impact of internal market trusts and GP fund holders.

That, if anything, must reflect the real Crisis in the Health Service.

I do not think that there is a Crisis in the Health Service in London.

There is no Crisis in the Health Service when it is moving along with the punch, the power and the impact of investment and resources.

There is a Crisis in the Health Service in London.

Far from zero publicity on the health service, is it not a fact that people up and down the country are recognising the real Crisis in the Health Service?

We want a dose of grown-up politics in discussing the Health Service Crisis in Birmingham.

Will the right hon. Gentleman reconsider the request from many hon. Members for a debate on the Crisis in the Health Service to be held as soon as possible?

It is clear that there is a Crisis in the Health Service.

I have spoken about the manifestations of the Crisis in the Health Service, so now I will highlight the core issues.

Does the Minister accept, as the Secretary of State apparently does, that there is a financial Crisis in the Health Service?

Why - as last Friday's poll in The Times showed - have law and order and crime and punishment now become the issues of greatest concern to the British public - more even than the state of the economy or the Crisis in the Health Service?

The Prime Minister: I seem to recall that it was a Labour Government who closed hospitals, cut nurses' pay 1032 and genuinely created a Crisis in the Health Service.

I seem to recall that it was a Labour Government who closed hospitals, cut nurses' payand genuinely created a Crisis in the Health Service.

But does the Prime Minister not realise that the Crisis in the Health Service is not next year - it is now.

At the beginning of the debate, the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) referred with approbation to many quotations about the so-called "Crisis in the Health Service".

Is not it also clear that, as well as the Crisis in the Health Service, the winter crisis in the health service is directly affected because elderly people are suffering from the cold wind and the effect of it on their bills, which causes them not to use the heating that they have?

The first financial Crisis in the Health Service was in 1949 - a year after it was started - when the then Labour Cabinet said that, as the health service had been in operation for a year, the population should be healthier, so the money going into the health service could be cut.

The Secretary of State should not be surprised that there is a Crisis in the Health Service, because on his desk is a report to Alan Langlands, chief executive of the national health service executive, on emergency care in the north-west region.

that he will not say that these are isolated incidents; that he will recognise that they are symptoms of the deepening Crisis in the Health Service; and that he will commit the Government to doing something quickly to resolve it.

Members wish to debate the intensive care beds situation because there is a real Crisis in the Health Service.

I repeat once again that I hope that the Minister can assure us that the case of Mrs. Harrild, like that of the constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East, will not be repeated; that he will not say that these are isolated incidents; that he will recognise that they are symptoms of the deepening Crisis in the Health Service; and that he will commit the Government to doing something quickly to resolve it.

Is my hon. Friend aware of the stage that the Crisis in the Health Service has now reached, at least in the Nottingham area?

She talked about "Crisis in the Health Service", constantly running the health service down, somehow suggesting that GPs are to be in the pay of unscrupulous commercial organisations.

It will stop people being put on trolleys, which I welcome, but it will not be used to stop waiting lists rising, nor will it deal with the hidden Crisis in the Health Service.

Is it not the case, as the British Medical Association has been saying along with us, that the obsession of the Labour Government with their so-called early pledge on health service waiting lists has made the current Crisis in Our Health Service far worse than it need have been and distorted clinical priorities away from patient priorities?

The Secretary of State for Health said the other day that the country faces a Crisis in the Health Service.

My hon. Friend the Minister should recognise that we have a Crisis in the Health Service, that we must try to overcome it, and that in the next three years - in the run-up to the next election - we ought to be able to say that we not only found the necessary money for the NHS, but found enough for nurses, midwives and the rest.

This morning, my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) introduced the debate on the Crisis in the Health Service.

The right hon. Gentleman is very generous, but he may have missed the fact that we spent a considerable part of the morning engaging in a major and well-attended debate about the Crisis in the Health Service, initiated by a Liberal Democrat.

The Secretary of State for Health has managed to recognise the Crisis in the Health Service caused by the lack of recruitment of nurses.

I beg to move,That this House recognises that rationing has always been a part of how the Health Service manages health care resources; expresses its dismay at the comments of the Right honourable Member for Dulwich and West Norwood denying the obvious fact that rationing exists in the Health Service; expresses grave concern at the proposed changes to be effected by Her Majesty's Government, which through bureaucratic bodies such as a National Institute for Clinical Excellence and a Commission for Health Improvement will force clinicians to carry the burden on rationing decisions; recognises that the availability of modern drugs for conditions such as schizophrenia and Ms makes clear the reality of rationing in today's Health Service; recognises the fact that waiting lists are a hidden form of rationing; notes that excessive political concentration upon waiting lists has been largely responsible for the continuing winter Crisis in the Health Service, over which Her Majesty's Government appears wholly complacent and unconcerned; and urges Her Majesty's Government to acknowledge the concerns of professional bodies such as the BMA over rationing and embark upon a mature debate on the future of the Health Service.

How many patients were left lying on trolleys because of this winter's Health Service Crisis?

I mentioned how the Crisis in the Health Service could have been averted had we used the independent sector better.

In view of the Crisis in the Health Service, perhaps a bit of straight talk and simple truth on those figures is warranted for the British people.

I know that every January is the same: there is always a Crisis in the Health Service.

In the country at large, people want to see Ministers answering for the Crisis in the Health Service, for chaos over constitutional reform, and for the problems and delays at the Dome.

Now that the right hon. Gentleman has finally recognised that he is presiding over a permanent Crisis in the Health Service, is it not time to put in place a proper programme of reform?

Unless they undertake to continue that expenditure, they will precipitate a Crisis in the Health Service, because there will no longer be the community support that my hon. Friend outlines.

Three and a half years on, waiting lists are longer and the Prime Minister predicts a Crisis in the Health Service.

I am interested to hear the hon. Lady accept that there is a Health Service Crisis in this context in both urban and rural areas.

I thank the Minister for that reply, but given that the number of people in Wales waiting more than six months for their first out-patient appointment has increased eightfold since 1997, and given that the Secretary of State for Health yesterday appeared to want to disown Wales entirely, what responsibility will the Secretary of State for Wales take for resolving the looming Crisis in the Health Service in Wales?

There are two root causes of the Health Service Crisis in West Worcestershire and, in particular, of the problems facing my constituency.

For this reason, there are now the makings of a financial Crisis in the Health Services in Worcestershire, and it is the Government's job to find a way out.

I am delighted to have this chance to raise in Parliament the Crisis in the Health Service in my constituency and in particular the threatened closure of Walnuttree hospital in Sudbury, a highly valued community hospital.

It attracted health workers from neighbouring countries, such as Angola, where there is a Crisis in the Health Service.

Add public concern to the big financial deficit and the resignation of Sir Nigel Crisp - to the discomfort of Ministers - and the press are writing not about success but about Crisis in the Health Service.

One can tell how big the Crisis in the Health Service is - the health service did not even get a mention.

Yesterday, he ran away from using his Budget to tackle the Crisis in Our Health Service.

However, no one looking at the current Crisis in the Health Service, with sackings, redundancies, huge deficits and great problems, can believe that productivity is advancing rapidly in that service.

The Crisis in the Health Service in Wiltshire is not limited to the closure of the community hospitals, although that is its pinnacle.

The general picture is one of financial Crisis in the Health Service throughout Hertfordshire, and it would appear that this problem is also affecting the antenatal classes and other maternity services at Watford hospital.

The Crisis in the Health Service in this country is every bit as big as the one to which the hon. Lady refers, or probably bigger.

Consequently, the responsibility for the Crisis in the Health Service in the north-east of Scotland lies firmly with the Scottish Government, led until a few weeks ago by Alex Salmond, the MSP for Aberdeenshire East.

I did not spend all my time talking about the NHS because, like the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, I believe that the Crisis in the Health Service cannot be resolved by the NHS alone.