More often than not, it’s not the number of people who turn up at A&E who cause the winter pressures; more people attend A&E during the summer months. Of course, it’s not much use or help when many people who don’t necessarily need to be in A&E do turn up with a heavy cold, or because they’ve drunk too much. But, even if we prevented that kind of access to our A&E departments, then the winter pressures still exist, because the winter pressures relate, if truth be told, to the kind of patients, those patients who need to be there and come through our hospital doors because, usually, they are older and they suffer multiple conditions simultaneously, which, as a result, causes more complex cases. It takes more time and more expertise to deal with those illnesses. It’s more complex to treat them successfully. People like these need a longer period in hospital, and, very often, they can’t be released from hospital because of a failure to put social care packages in place that are appropriate.

Of course, the winter does make it more likely that a patient will be taken ill because of cold weather. When it’s slippery outside, it’s more likely that an elderly patient may slip. There are also additional problems caused, for example, by low-quality housing during the winter months. But warmer weather can also have an impact on these patients, by causing ill health, causing dehydration, sunstroke and so on and so forth. So, in the midst of these seasonal pressures, what we have, if truth be told, is a kind of patient who is more vulnerable, and understanding that means that we can understand which policies will, hopefully, be put in place in order to help the NHS to plan for the changes in patterns of usage—and that’s where our amendments come in.

Incredibly, we still have to highlight social care through our amendments, and highlight its importance in helping the NHS. It’s incredible that the Conservatives seem to be wedded to the idea that it’s possible to safeguard the NHS budget on the one hand, and to cut expenditure for social care on the other, without there being any sort of impact. I think failing to include social care in the original motion slightly dents your credibility in this regard. We will be voting against the Government amendment, because it would delete our amendments and makes the same careless mistake of failing to address the importance of social care.

To conclude, a few other policies that would be of assistance: investment in services to keep people healthy and out of hospital in the first place—that's preventative services, through social care services, medical care, out-of-hours care, which could assist people to receive treatment earlier when they’re ill, flu jabs—we know that there are current problems with the provision of flu jabs—and, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, low-quality housing. We need to think across all Government departments as to how we create a more robust population. There are things that we can look at in terms of flexibility and increasing flexibility among staff in hospitals in order to ensure that periods of bad weather don’t have such an adverse impact on staff ability to get to work, and through monitoring need in real time and defining that need in a more considered way than simply through figures alone, then we could respond by shifting staff and sharing facilities and so on and so forth.

Without doubt, preparing effectively for seasonal pressures is something that should be commonplace, and we, I believe, must see an end to the excuses that we hear annually, and we must be in a situation where we don't have to return to the same topic year on year.