 Good morning all. I almost said good afternoon there, but it's not afternoon is it? It's morning. Good morning. Hope you're all doing well. Thanks for joining me. Very welcome to All Things Heartly April. This morning we'll talk about the NHS and there's a reason I want to talk about the NHS, which I'll get into in a couple of seconds. But first, I've been talking about running a campaign for small businesses, which I will be asking future candidates, activists all around the country to do the same. I've got a little something up my sleeve on this, how to offer some practical help. So I'm just sort of re-jigging the letter a little bit, but this letter it will be, I'll complete it today and I'll send a draft of it around to future candidates and activists around the country to change it, modify it for your own area. So that's something that I am working on and I hope to have finished today, but I do have something up my sleeve for this. I want to, there's a couple of businesses that I want to mention, a couple of things going on in Heartly April that I want to mention. But I want to start, I'll start on the issue at hand and that issue is the NHS and specifically an article that appeared in this morning's regional BBC about North Tees Hospital. Now if you're in Heartly April and you need to go to A&E, you will go to the North Tees Hospital in Stockton because there is no A&E in Heartly April and I'll just, let's just remind ourselves of this in an article going back to 2011. This is something again, not exclusive to this town, happens in towns and cities all over the country, closure of absolutely vital NHS services. And you will get this, let's talk about just a quick mention of public consultation on all this. For Britain's policy is that we will, the people, the local people under a proposed Public Sector Accountability Act will give people an inexpensive way to genuinely hold the leaders of locally, local publicly funded services to account. In that, if it can be shown by an independent body that the, for example, the chief executive of your local council or the chief executive of your local hospital or the local leaders of police, for example, are not actually doing their job, they can be removed from that job by order of the local people. That's the only way that we are going to make these people do their jobs properly and prioritize the local people when they are doing their job. It's the only way that's going to do it. You'll have things at public consultations. A public consultation will is essentially useless to my mind. First of all, because a lot of the public won't know about it. And secondly, and it's been my long experience and wide experience of this, that even when there is a public consultation, the few people who know about it and who participate in it, even if they have objections, those objections will largely be ignored if local government, for example, has already made up its mind what it wants to do. This public consultation exercise, therefore, is really a rubber stamp. It is to show we consult, look, we consulted the public. We ignored them when they told us what they wanted, but at least we consulted them. This is what you get. So public consultations utter nonsense. And here's one of the examples. This is going back to 2011 and it's from the BBC's Tease Regional News. And it says, campaigners to keep University Hospital of Hartlepool's accident and emergency unit say they have not given up their fight despite its closure. A major shakeup of emergency treatment in the town has now come into force. North Tease and Hartlepool NHS Trust said most people would still be treated in the town. That's not true. It's not true. If you have to go to A&E, now you have to go all the way to Stockton. I saw a million miles away, but it is. If you're in dire need of emergency care, it's very far away. So the promise was at the time that would still be A&E services in Hartlepool the right. That promise was worthless. So despite protests and people were fighting this tooth and nail, it didn't matter. It was closed. Now the trust at the time said the majority of patients would be treated at Hartlepool's One Life Centre. Again, this is simply not true. If you have a scratch or a scrape, maybe, but if you are in need of actual emergency medical care, you'll have to go to Stockton. Despite widespread protests, the hospital authorities had made up their minds and this is what happened. The A&E closed and there is no A&E, there is no accident and emergency facility in this town. So this morning on the regional news on BBC for the Tease region, the headline, North Tease Hospital has 10 years left. Boss warns. Let me read down through it. A crumbling hospital built in the 1960s has only 10 years left before a new one will be needed. A health boss has warned. Staff at the University of North Tease Hospital in Stockton said it was dingy and cluttered and moving patients was a daily challenge. It also costs £8 million a year for running repairs, including roof leaks. Julie Gillan, Chief Executive of North Tease and Hartlepool NHS Trust said a new hospital was needed. The Department of Health and Social Care said it was planning to build eight new hospitals nationwide and a selection process would begin later this year. It also said it was giving the North Tease Trust £3 million to spend on A&E upgrades as well as £3.5 million to address backlog maintenance. Okay, so here's what the government is promising. The government is promising £3 million for A&E upgrades and £3.5 million for backlog maintenance and let's just go back a couple of sentences. It also costs £8 million a year for running repairs. Anyone see a problem? It's £1.5 million short of just what it costs every year to keep the place ticking over with repairs, including roof leaks. So they're offering £6.5 million for a hospital that spends £8 million a year just on repairs. Going on with the articles, the North Tease Hospital opened in the 1960s and was considered state of the art at the time. Ms Gillan said we know we only have a 10-year lifespan left in terms of the building's concrete structure and infrastructure. Our staff want to walk in a new build, airy, cosmetically pleasing building, but they also want to work in a safe space and to achieve that we need a new build. Hospital Matron Allison McCullough said, To get patients to and from areas we have to go around equipment all the time. We've got trolleys and corridors that should not really be there. It's day-to-day challenge getting from A to B safely. The trust director of finance Neil Atkinson said the hospital is very dingy and cluttered and it doesn't make a great impression for patients. We also have to put aside a lot of money for repairs. In the last few weeks we've had to fix a lot of roofing because we've had floods. This takes money away from front-line services. Plans to build a super hospital for the area were mooted more than 20 years ago. However, the project for the £460 million, £660 bad hospital at Winniard Park near Stockton was axed in 2010 by the then Liberal Democrat Treasury Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, because it was not affordable. It would have replaced hospital buildings in both Stockton and Hartlepool. The Department of Health and Social Care said, Patient safety is our top priority and we are investing record sums to upgrade the NHS's physical infrastructure so we can provide the best possible quality of care. This is just, this is politicians speak for, we don't care, go away, we don't care. We need to spend our money elsewhere, don't you know, like illegal immigration and things. So in a nutshell, no A&E in Hartlepool, it was closed despite public protests at the time. People were fobbed off with the promise that there'd be an A&E in the town at the One Life Centre, there isn't. Like I say, scratch or scrape maybe, but if you need emergency, medical care, you have to go to Stockton. Over we go to Stockton, to the North Tees Hospital which is spending £8 million a year on repairs because the place is falling down around the years of the staff and patients by the centre of things. And the government is giving it, even though it spends £8 million a year, the government is giving it £6.5 million to, I don't know, plug a hole, I don't know, put a plaster over a hole in the building, it's utter nonsense. Plans to rebuild to the Chief Executive of North Tees is now saying that she wants, they need a new hospital, a new hospital entirely, but 20 years ago the government said they couldn't afford it. So that was that and they gave the usual, and the politicians are giving the usual tripe of patient safety as our top priority and blah blah blah, we know the deal. So there's a couple of problems here and there's just literally no political party in the country, apart from ours, that addresses this stuff. One is that the government does not prioritise this at all. We have a scenario and to beat the same drum, but it is a drum that needs beating over and over again because it's the truth, it's the reality of the situation. Billions, billions of pounds a year, I sent out of this country to warlords in Africa and Asia and I do mean warlords, most, the vast vast vast majority of that money doesn't go anywhere near people living in poverty, it goes to corrupt dictators and warlords. That's where it goes. I've covered this actually in a video previously, which I'll try to hunt out and put in the YouTube underneath this video because with those billions that are sent abroad every year, A, we don't know where a lot of it goes, but we do know where some of it goes and most of what we know is taken by criminal gangs. There's one problem, the government has no, doesn't prioritise its own people at all, at all. So instead of spending those billions on warlords and dictators abroad, here's an idea. Why don't we spend it on the British people here? Crazy, I know, but let's give it a try, I think. That's your first problem and there are other issues of the government, the central government in Westminster, wastes billions of pounds of taxpayers' money on anything, it seems, other than the British people and the basic needs and this is a basic need. And again, I'll bang the drum again because it needs to be banged. How many people are coming into this country every day and been housed in hotels? Hundreds, a day, housed in hotels. I've lost heart-breaking stories to tell you about and we're going to be covering this in a special video down in Dover very, very soon. But there are areas, Folkestone, Dover, other parts of Kent, I was speaking to someone this week about it, people, British people on the streets, including veterans, including people in desperate need of medical care, on the streets who, as the person I spoke to told me, is an activist in Kent who works hard, he does, for example, food deliveries to homeless people and is told and knows this perfectly well, that some of these people, as he put it, would give their left arm for a night in a hotel, just a night in a hotel. Absolutely shocking, shocking. So while the central government's problem number one, it's spending our money, billions of pounds on it, on just about anything and anyone except the meeting the basic needs of the British people. That's problem number one. Problem number two is within the NHS itself and this is an issue that is not addressed at all. I mean, when election time comes around, you'll hear politicians talk about how they're investing record sums in the NHS. No, clearly not enough. I mean, look at this, going back to 2010, they couldn't afford to build new hospitals up here in the Harley Pearl Stockton area. Unaffordable, they said, 460 million it would have cost, unaffordable. I guarantee you that same year, they would have spent billions, adding it to criminal gangs in Africa and Asia, billions. But 460 million for Stockton and Harley Pearl was simply too much money. I couldn't afford it. So they may say at election time that they are investing record sums into the NHS and they try to out-compete each other, that the Labour and the Tories, they try to outspend each other on the NHS. None of it is ever enough, of course, but that's what they do and that's all they do at election time, lip service, record sums, record sums, record sums. That's all they ever say. What they don't talk about is where those record sums go when they go in to the hospitals themselves. And here is the second major problem with the NHS and it's here that for Britain's policy of holding major players in local hospitals, for example, to account comes in to play. How are they spending the money that the government does give them? I appreciate that it's not enough, but when you are struggling with money, you have to prioritise your spending. This is common sense stuff. How do they prioritise the spending? Well, usually, frankly, by wasting it and by paying themselves. This is nothing you should come as no surprise to anyone. I guarantee you that a lot of the 8 million, for example, that is spent on repairs every year will be excessive spending. I don't think, for example, that these hospitals are getting local handymen or whatever it may be and to do these jobs. They will have contracts which are largely overpriced, much like procurement contracts that the NHS goes into in general. You may pay five, six quid for a plain single-bedded bed sheet and you can't get them for that cheap. But the NHS will pay 20 quid extra per sheet. You can buy a packet of plasters down in in boots for a quid or so. The NHS will pay five quid for the same plasters. This goes, this is across the board. The NHS ridiculously overpays for things, completely unnecessarily. And the problem with that is management. The management are the people in charge here. They are the ones who decide the procurement contracts and they are the ones therefore responsible for spending ridiculous amounts of money on something they could get much, much cheaper. So the management of the NHS and how that money is spent is a big problem, not the only problem, but one almost as big as the fact that the central government under funds in the first place, the money they do have, they squander. The latest I can find in the admittedly brief time I've had, the latest I can find on this, for example, on management costs. And one thing I know for my years of working in the NHS is a massive excess of management. You go to a meeting, a management meeting, and you will have several layers of management, sometimes paying consultancy fees, extortionate consultancy fees, that's another thing the NHS wastes money on. Management consultants, what you have are managers on large salaries, layers and layers of them. You'll have five or six bosses if you work in the NHS, layers and layers of them, paying external management consultants to come in and tell them how to do their job. And some of the things will genuinely blow your mind, like spending six-figure sums to consult, external consultants, I don't mean medical consultants, doctors by the way, I mean consultants, who will, they will pay extortionate sums, including six-figure sums to people to come in to tell them how to save money. This is what we're dealing with. Well, you can start by not paying extortionate sums for people. If you're not able to do the job, don't you? Why are you doing the job? Your job is to manage. Why are you paying externally for someone to tell you how to do your job? So you've got layers of payment for the same thing. The whole thing is a shambles, an absolute shambles. But the massive salaries, and we covered this quite a bit coming up to the local elections in May, massive salaries. And the last I can find of this, and again, admittedly, with a brief time I have, was from September 2014. And this is from the, this is an article from Gazette Live, Teeside Live, which caught my eye. And the headline is 15,000 salary increase for chief job at Teeside Health Trust is slammed by Nursing Union. The Royal College of Nursing Leaders have branded chief executives pay rises as one rule for managers and another rule for frontline nursing staff. What had happened here is that the chief executives, chief executive had given itself a £15,000 a year pay increase on an already rather handsome salary while the nurses had their wages frozen. And we were in a situation at the time where there was a shortfall of tens of thousands of nurses. And nurses are leaving the NHS in droves due to bad wages and bad conditions. And I'm sorry, but you need nurses to run a health service. This is basic, basic stuff. You don't need layers of bureaucrats, that's 15 bottles to every member of staff. You need nurses. But the NHS is so badly managed that it doesn't seem to understand. It doesn't understand that nurses need good pay, that their morale must be high. And for morale to be high, they must be treated fairly. And when you are freezing nurse salaries and giving yourself the chief executive a massive pay rise, morale is going to suffer. That is essentially the state of the NHS. So there are two things. One, stop. The central government must stop giving billions of pounds of taxpayers money abroad and spend it here instead. And two, when that money is given to the National Health Service or other public services, it must be used in the interests of the service that is being provided. In other words, stop wasting money on ridiculous procurement contracts. Stop wasting money on layers of bureaucrat and unnecessary management. Stop wasting money on consultancy to tell you how to do your job. Start spending it on medical care and on nursing care and on a hospital, decent hospital for people to go and get treatments in. This is basic stuff. It really is. And yet somehow, the two political parties that, between them, govern this country, don't seem to understand this basic stuff. Simple, basic stuff. But too much, too much for both Labour and Conservative governments, it seems. Okay, one more story very quickly on something happening here in Hartlepool. This is from the Hartlepool Mail today. Multi-billion pound proposal for nuclear waste disposal facility will not be forced on Hartlepool. Going down, it says Hartlepool has been identified as a potential host for a multi-billion pound underground store for all of the UK's higher activity radioactive waste in a development called a geological disposal facility. Public organisation, radioactive waste management is leading the project to find a Willam community to take this facility. So going down, it says that Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen and Hartlepool Council leader Shane Moore have spoken out against this. The general gist of it is that it won't happen unless the people are okay with it, although the local government is speaking out against it. It won't be forced on the town. This has made me, this is not in here, but it has made me think about, and I'll be keeping close eye on this, about public consultation. That's what I mentioned at the start this morning, is public consultation. I will be keeping a close eye on this and I will be seeing whether or not there is a public consultation. What it says, because I've read other articles about this and the general fluff that's being read at the moment is that we won't happen unless the people of Hartlepool agree for it to happen. Let's see how the opinion of the people of Hartlepool is obtained. So I'll be keeping a very close eye on that one. There is a second story very briefly for a war memorial statue for here in Hartlepool. There is a fundraiser going on at the moment to build a war memorial in the town to restore the fundraiser, I'll read it to you just briefly, fundraiser Stephen Close is leading a project to restore the Boer War Memorial in Ward Jackson Park to its former glory, set up a £25,000 appeal to pay for a new statue that was sold after the previous one was stolen, presumably for scrap more than 50 years ago. So he has already raised £18,000 of £25,000 for this and good for him. Speaking of Ward Jackson Park, I mentioned last week that we were going to, I'd registered a stand in the park on astandinthepark.org which is a now worldwide campaign for our freedoms back post coronavirus. I went on Sunday morning just gone, absolutely fantastic morning, met some lovely people. I am in the world this weekend, however I'll be back that Sunday and any other Sunday that I can. So I just want to say hi and thanks to everyone that I met there on Sunday in Ward Jackson Park, 10 to 11 every Sunday. Finally, local business I want to say a big thank you to is Lillian's coffee shop in the town centre. Not only does it do a beautiful surroundings, there's a fantastic cup of coffee, but I was there last week to help out a local person struggling with a housing issue and when I was leaving the fantastic lady who runs the place stopped me to say that she understood that I helped people in the community and that she wanted me to know that she also has some she can give out advice and help with services for people who are struggling financially, homeless people etc. And if I knew of any of the give out for example hygiene packs for people she gave me a sample which I'll be giving on. So Lillian's coffee shop cafe in the centre of Hartlepool, if you need help and she has given me her consent to tell you this, if you need help if you're struggling go in to Lillian. She also told me that it's the only coffee shop in Hartlepool that allows homeless people to use its resources I think is amazing. It's a beautiful it's a beautiful place. So Lillian's in the centre of the town if you need help give her a shout pop in and see her and she has advice and information and practical bits and bobs to help people out. So thank you very much to Lillian's who are so kind and so such a very kind to me very kind to the people of Hartlepool. Okay that's it for me for this morning. I shall be back this afternoon I'll be recording a stream with our climate spokesman Paul on the latest report on climate change. So have a look out for that published perhaps tomorrow if not definitely Friday I know Paul wants to do some editing with it. I'll be back with my usual live stream on Monday night at half past seven. Thanks very much everyone for joining me I shall see you soon take care. Thank you for watching if you agree with what you hear on four britain videos remember to like them share them and subscribe to our channel and why not follow us on social media as well the relevant links are below thank you