- Health Secretary worries about 'tensions' due to uncontrolled migration
- Fears mounting anger against migrants would mean his Chinese wife and children would face hostility for using the NHS
- Warns if 'health tourism' is not tackled, country may not be able to afford decent care for everyone
- At least £500 million a year is lost because hospitals do not ask many foreigners to pay for care, he said
Jeremy Hunt has admitted that he fears for the future of his three children who are half Chinese – because uncontrolled immigration risks causing ‘tensions’ in Britain.
The Health Secretary said he was worried that mounting anger against migrants would mean his Chinese wife and their children would face hostility for using the NHS.
He warned that unless the level of immigration was brought back under control, the UK would have to face up to the sort of ‘social divisions’ that had tarnished other countries.
Mr Hunt said that if the NHS did not get better at tackling ‘health tourism’, the country may not be able to afford decent care for everyone.
At least £500 million a year is being lost because hospitals do not ask many foreigners to pay for the care they receive, he said.
There would be growing anger among voters if it looked as if they were being denied NHS care because the cost of treating migrants and overseas visitors was so high, Mr Hunt added. He made his hard-hitting warnings about immigration in a phone-in programme hosted by Iain Dale on LBC Radio.
‘I’d like to make one general point about immigration,’ he said. ‘My wife is Chinese and she obviously lives with me in London.
‘My children are half Chinese and I do not want them to grow up in a country where people look at immigrants and say it’s difficult for me to access NHS services because of people like you.
‘And that’s why it’s so important to have sensible, balanced, controlled immigration in this country. Because otherwise we’ll have social divisions, we’ll have tensions, which thankfully in this country we’ve avoided for many years unlike other countries.’
Mr Hunt met his wife, Lucia Guo, six years ago at a conference in London where she was working as a recruiter for Chinese students. Their children are Jack, four, Anna, two, and Eleanor, who was born in July.
His warning has come after the Tories failed to meet their election pledge to cut immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’.
Although immigration from outside the EU has been cut, the Coalition has been unable to tackle immigration from the continent because of freedom of movement rules.
David Cameron has vowed to claw back powers over our borders from the EU ahead of an in/out referendum by the end of 2017. Last week, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon warned that some communities felt ‘swamped’ and ‘under siege’ from migrants.
Senior doctors have warned of the disastrous effect of ‘health tourism’ on the NHS, with people coming to Britain to access free cancer, HIV, kidney and infertility treatment.
Mr Hunt added: ‘It is a National Health Service and not an International Health Service and we have to do something about this – we are doing something about this. We simply can’t afford to give everyone free medical care. It is important to say that 40 per cent of doctors in the NHS are from an ethnic minority and we benefit massively from foreign nurses, foreign doctors.’
But Mr Hunt said the NHS was not good enough at collecting money from foreigners, who ‘don’t have a right to free care on the NHS’.
But he added, however, that action was being taken, such as ‘stopping the issuing of NHS numbers to anyone who turns up in a GP surgery’
Source: the Dailymail
