The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, for calling this debate, which has been both wide-ranging and characterised by some extremely thoughtful and eloquent contributions. I welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues, which are so important to us all. Of course, being impressed by eloquence is not the same as being swayed by argument. It will not surprise your Lordships that I cannot identify with the criticisms of the Government’s policy voiced by several speakers. By and large, those criticisms are either misplaced or exaggerated and I hope to show why.
It is perhaps appropriate to start with the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, about why we are reforming the NHS. First, as good as the NHS is, in what is most important for patients and many health outcomes—for many cancers, respiratory disease and heart attacks—we lag behind. Secondly, in its current state, the NHS is unsustainable. We can no longer meet increasing demand by spending ever more money. In every western economy, cost pressures from healthcare exceed GDP growth. There is a basic challenge of affordability. Without reform, the NHS will quickly bend until it breaks.
We seek to address a good part of that challenge through the four pillars of the QIPP programme—quality, innovation, productivity and prevention. In many ways the White Paper is a vehicle for the QIPP reforms, squeezing the most out of every penny invested and creating a better-value and entrepreneurial NHS. Looking more particularly at the prevention agenda, our focus on public health through Public Health England will do as much to keep people healthy as the NHS does to make them well.
Although some see the reforms as a big step—I do not disguise the fact that there will be some big changes—they amount in several other respects to a series of small steps. GP-led commissioning builds on the experience gained from previous reforms, particularly practice-based commissioning and GP fundholding. Our any willing provider policy is an extension of the choice agenda initiated by the previous Government. Without lowering the quality bar—I say that particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Touhig—we are completing the rollout of foundation trusts, only this time with robust arrangements for provider failure. The reforms resolve and bring coherence to a series of sometimes disjointed measures rolled out under the previous Administration. Our aim in doing this is very clear: it is to transform the health service into a sustainable system with outcomes as good as any in the world.
Noble Lords need to ask themselves what the alternative would be. Without reform, the alternative is to salami-slice the health service as it is now, with obvious risk and detriment to patients. We know that the previous Administration put aside £1.7 billion for NHS reorganisation of some sort. We will never know what precisely they would have done, but if it was not something similar to our proposals then I wonder what it was.
The other vital strand to the new NHS—again, this was a clear ambition of the previous Administration—is the genuine integration of health and social care, which was mentioned by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the noble Lords, Lord Turnberg and Lord Beecham. We are putting a lot of money into integrated care. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, that the involvement of social care in commissioning will be a key role of the health and well-being boards and the related joint strategic needs assessments that will need to be undertaken by consortia and local authorities working together. What she will see, based on those joint strategic needs assessments, will be better, more integrated health and social care services for patients.
The Government’s response to the White Paper consultations was also published yesterday. This sets out the legislative framework and next steps for the White Paper as we move towards publishing a health and social care Bill in the new year. I wish to pick out two or three issues from this. First, as regards commissioning, the best decisions are those taken closest to those whom they affect. Unfortunately, time prevents me from expatiating on the excellent theme of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson. However, GP-led commissioning will place decisions about the future design of local health services in the hands of clinicians—GPs and their colleagues across the NHS and social care working together. These are people who see their patients and service users every day.
Last week, in response to the consultation, we announced the first 52 in a rolling programme of GP consortia pathfinders. These are in essence the pilots to which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, urged us to direct our efforts. This first batch involves more than 1,800 GP practices and covers a quarter of the population—some 12.8 million people. The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, doubted whether integrated care was truly achievable. I visited a pathfinder last week in Nottinghamshire and came away completely inspired by what I saw there in terms of joint working, creative thinking and the breaking down of professional barriers. Noble Lords who have thus far viewed the Government’s proposals solely from the printed word should consider experiencing what is actually happening on the ground. Pathfinders will enable emerging consortia to become more involved more quickly in commissioning. They will explore the issues involved in effective implementation before consortia take on their statutory duties in 2012-13.
The noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Touhig, and others somewhat poured cold water on the whole concept of GP-led commissioning. However, it will remove the current disconnect between clinical decision-making and financial decision-making by putting both in the same place. Those who question the wisdom of that approach should speak to some of the pathfinder GPs. They do not see themselves as being presented with a problem; they see themselves as being able at long last to manage budgets in a way that will change services and bring maximum benefit to all their patients without “the system” getting in their way. The brutal truth is that a budget that is subject to the kind of managerialism referred to by my noble friend Lord Alderdice risks depriving some patients of the care that they need. To those who question the enthusiasm of GPs, I say that the first application for becoming a pathfinder was oversubscribed. More will be coming on stream. By the middle of 2011, we believe that the vast majority of GP practices will be members of pathfinder consortia.
At the centre of everything should be the patient. The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, was right in her general point, although I did not agree with everything that she said subsequently. The NHS should be accountable to the people whom it serves. Patients and the public should have a say in how local NHS services are shaped and should be able to hold them to account in a meaningful way. Beyond a straightforward legal duty for NHS organisations to consult the public, the new local patient champion, HealthWatch, will ensure that people’s voices are heard and acted on. It will be supported by a new national patient voice, HealthWatch England—a short step from what we have at the moment with local LINks, but an absolutely crucial one. The patient voice will also be vital for the new health and well-being boards, which will join up the local NHS, public health and social care. The fact that these boards will be based in local authorities will, of itself, inject a high degree of local democratic accountability into commissioning.
The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, and others referred to the trend towards competition, arguing that there is little evidence of its benefits. As we set out in the White Paper, choice and competition can be powerful drivers for quality and efficiency and can force providers to develop services that genuinely meet patients’ needs and preferences. However, we do not want to introduce the choice of any willing provider for its own sake. That makes sense only where it is likely to deliver real benefits. Competition should not be at the expense of co-operation and there is no reason why it should be. There will still be a duty in the health Bill for NHS organisations to co-operate in patients’ interests.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Finlay, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Rea, with his arboricultural hat on, suggested that we keep PCTs and simply populate them differently. Let me say why that would not have delivered the outcomes that we want. PCTs are administrative units. The way in which they are configured bears no automatic relationship to the way in which clinicians want to deliver services, and clinicians feel no sense of ownership of them. The pathfinder consortium that I visited in Nottinghamshire last week is configured in a way that takes account of patient flows between primary and secondary care, is logical in terms of how health and social care services are best integrated and works on the ground in terms of close professional relationships. Doctors and other health professionals have designed it; they own it and they believe in it. That is the difference.
The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, referred to fundholding, which I agree was not a successful enterprise in some respects, although it had some valuable lessons which we are now picking up on. Fundholding had a conflict of interests because, as the noble Lord said, underspends of the commissioning budgets tended to go to the practice involved. This will not be the case for GP consortia. The only way in which GPs will be able to benefit is if they can improve outcomes for patients.
The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, referred to the risk of recreating or accentuating the postcode lottery. Perhaps I may say that the prime purpose of the National Health Service commissioning board will be to inject two main things, consistency and quality, into commissioning. The NHS commissioning board, supported by NICE, will develop a commissioning outcomes framework so that there is clear, publicly available information on the quality of healthcare services commissioned by consortia. It will include measures to reflect a consortium’s duties to promote equality and to assess progress in reducing health inequalities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lords, Lord Touhig, Lord Patel and Lord Beecham, criticised the injection of competition and choice into local health economies and expressed fears about cherry-picking. In the new system, the NHS board and Monitor will develop packages of services and tariffs for services, taking account of the need for individual providers or partnerships of providers to deliver integrated care. Monitor will have a duty to ensure that competition, where it is appropriate, functions effectively, which means developing systems where providers cannot cherry-pick the easiest patient groups.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and others raised various issues concerning accountability and governance. I suspect that we will get into the weeds of this when the health and social care Bill reaches your Lordships’ House, as there is no time to do so today. We think that consortia should be free to define their own governance processes but within a broad framework that will be set out in the legislation. Noble Lords will have to wait to see what that legislation says but I can tell the House that the NHS commissioning board will have a role in establishing consortia and, in doing so, it will seek to ensure that consortia have the systems in place to fulfil their statutory functions in a proper way that takes account of the stewardship of public money.
My noble friend Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank asked whether there will be a regional role for the NHS commissioning board. It will be for the board itself to decide how it designs the most effective and cost-effective operating model. The board will determine the optimal configuration of its sub-structures with the freedom to adapt over time.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, spoke, as he always does, about education and training, particularly their impact on research and academic medicine. We shall shortly be publishing a consultation document on future arrangements for education and training, which I hope will begin to answer his questions. The noble Lord talked about the importance of research. As Research Minister, I am enthusiastically on his side on that score. Supporting and promoting research and development will be a core function of the future Department of Health, and the Government remain committed to providing the right environment for innovation to flourish. I think that the increased funding for health research in the recent spending review gives us a strong platform to fulfil that ambition.
The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, asked about the position of the 10 specialised commissioning groups, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, referred in particular to specialist mental health services. The new NHS commissioning board will commission national and regional specialised services. The consultation has highlighted the need for criteria to be developed to determine which services should be commissioned by the board or by a lead consortium across a population. We will consider the best way to keep the specialised services portfolio under regular review and, as Minister for specialised services, I can tell the House that I will keep a close personal eye on those issues.
The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, doubted whether the HealthWatch model was the way to proceed and she referred to the constant reinvention of patient and public involvement. While local HealthWatch organisations will retain the current functions of LINks, they will also gain additional functions, providing advice and signposting, as well as advocacy, for NHS complaints. We are continuing to work with LINks to build on the valuable work that volunteers have taken forward. As I mentioned, HealthWatch England will be established as a national consumer champion both to give patients and the public a voice at a national level and to provide advice and support for the new local HealthWatch organisations.
The noble Baroness, in her criticism, was doubtful that the local LINks and HealthWatch, as they are to become, will be up to the job. The Command Paper sets out that, while HealthWatch should have an advocacy role, which is one of the roles that we envisage for it, this will not have to be through its own staff. Local authorities will have the flexibility to commission services from other providers, which could include citizens advice bureaux, for example. We have done this. We have created that flexibility, as we recognised the expertise that is required in advocacy services.
The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, asked what arrangements there were for the sustained development of clinical leaders. Clinicians with leadership skills are central to our efforts to deliver better outcomes for patients and a critical part of successful commissioning. The National Leadership Council’s commissioning work scheme will provide targeted development for GPs who wish to lead consortia. Its work will ensure that, with the advent of consortia in 2013, there will be a suitably skilled group of individuals prepared to lead these organisations.
The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, spoke about the role of NICE. There is no time for me to reply in detail, except to say that on this subject he was 100 per cent wrong. I will write to reassure him. He also asked about the likely number of GP-led consortia, as did the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. We are intending this to be a bottom-up process, so we have no set expectations of how many consortia there may be. There are, as I mentioned, 52 pathfinders, which we announced the other day, covering 25 per cent of the population. What we will see emerging is the pathfinders exploring the issues involved, including which services are best commissioned at which level.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, asked what the key essential services will be and how we will make sure that they are available. We will set out the definition of essential services in the health Bill, but broadly a service will be defined as essential if the commissioner could not turn to a suitable alternative service for patients if the incumbent provider stopped offering it. Monitor will be responsible for the process of identifying essential services and ensuring that they are protected, working closely with the board, consortia and other stakeholders.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, suggested, we will return to these issues. The Government are committed to the values of the National Health Service: healthcare for all, free at the point of need. In view of all the talk about privatisation, that needs stating. But we are equally committed to doing everything possible to ensure that the quality of that healthcare, as measured by clinical outcomes, is as good as it is possible to be. I believe that our reforms will enable us to achieve exactly that.