As a small boy in Liverpool I remember my Mum taking me to the local clinic for vaccinations and being given special shoes to fix my ‘flat feet.’ I also remember ‘nitty nora’ the school nurse coming in to school to check me and my pals for nits, worms, and rickets. I can even remember being given a daily dose of Rose Hip Syrup so that I got all the vitamins I needed.

What I did not know then is how extra-ordinary this was. It was the 1950s and all these things were being done for me by a National Health Service that was then just a few years old. If I had been born a few years earlier there would have been no free health treatment for me as a toddler, no free vitamins and no free vaccinations.

On July 5th we will celebrate the National Health Services sixtieth anniversary. Its creation was the greatest triumph of the post war Labour Government.

But it all nearly came to an end in the 90s. The Conservative Government starved the NHS of cash, people would routinely wait two years for even serious operations, hospital buildings were falling down and huge numbers of people were being forced to ‘go private’. Putting this right has been, perhaps, the biggest triumph of this Labour Government.

Now we have hundreds more nurses, doctors and other health professionals in our area alone. The NHS is now performing more than one million extra operations a year, urgent operations are done at once and virtually no-one now waits more than 6 months for their procedure.

But let’s focus on the future.

New drugs and better clinical practices provide us with huge opportunities, whilst diseases like obesity and diabetes as well as an ageing population present big challenges. So our mission now is to make the NHS a more personal health service focussing on preventing ill health as well as curing it.

We have many great family doctors here in Thanet but It's no good having a great GP if you can't get to the surgery when they are open so, by 2009, the majority of GP surgeries will be open for at least one evening or weekend session every week. And while local GPs will deliver more and more services, we will also continue to build local health centres and walk-in clinics to fit around our busy lives.

We will also continue to drive down hospital waiting times and soon no-one will wait more than 18 weeks from first seeing your GP to having the procedure that it turns out you need. We’ll continue to invest not only in acute health services but mental health services and we’ll do more to integrate NHS and social care services so older people get the very best of care when they need it.

So sixty years on, we still have free access to high-quality healthcare and people feel safe in the knowledge that if they or their family need the NHS, it is there for them. The many people who work for our NHS deserve our thanks for that but so does this Labour Government, for believing in the NHS and being prepared to invest in it. And, whilst Labour is in power, that will always be the case.