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New Member
09:35 - The House divided: - Ayes: 1 / Noes: 125 - Question accordingly negatived.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the House sit in private.
Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 163).
National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill
(10 years ago)
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13:19 - The House having divided: - Ayes: 239 / Noes: 20 - Question accordingly agreed to.
13:34 - The House having divided: - Ayes: 241 / Noes: 18 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Today we begin to restore the sovereignty of this House over our national health service. We begin to put patients at the heart of decision making. We will restore the responsibility of the Secretary of State to promote a comprehensive national health service. We will tear the heart out of the hated Health and Social Care Act 2012. We will remove the health service commissioners’ obligation to put services out to tender. We will replace the 49% private patient cap, and allow the Secretary of State to set limits. We will prevent competition authorities from interfering in mergers that are in the interests of NHS patients. We will stop the sale of assets that are in the long-term interests of patients and our national health service. We will restore the powers of the Secretary of State to direct health commissioners. We will create a framework for national health service contracts that will put the interests of patients before competition. We will protect the NHS from the imposition of competition rules by the transatlantic trade and investment partnership, and give sovereignty to this House.
Through this House, the Secretary of State will be accountable for promoting a comprehensive national health service. If any Government dare to impose competition on our national health service in the future, they will have to come before the House and repeal this Bill, if it becomes an Act. We, as Members of the House, will be accountable to our constituents for how we vote in that debate. There will be no hiding place.
Some have expressed the fear that the Bill opens the door to further privatisation. It does not. I accept that the last Labour Government unlocked the door to competition, albeit in a modest and measured way. I voted against the creation of hospital foundation trusts, which introduced legally binding contracts with NHS commissioners; in retrospect it was a mistake, because it brought procurement law into parts of the NHS.
Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on being so lucky in the draw. He has referred to competition. Does he not accept that Labour did much more than he is suggesting? The then Secretary of State, who is now the shadow Secretary of State, privatised an entire hospital in the east of England. That is privatisation. [Interruption.]
Clive Efford
It is not possible to compare what went on under the last Government with what has been introduced by the raw market mechanisms of the 2012 Act.
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend. Is he aware that in north Staffordshire, cancer and end-of-life care is going into the private sector on a 10-year contract worth £1.2 billion?
Clive Efford
There are numerous examples of contracts that are going out to tender, and the cost to the national health service of lawyers and accountants is increasing. The Government have made so much of the issue of bureaucracy in the NHS, but when I asked the Secretary of State about the cost of those lawyers and accountants to oversee the tendering process, what was the response? It was, “We do not collect those figures centrally.” I wonder why that is.
Clive Efford
Ah! The hon. Gentleman is presumably getting to his feet to apologise for supporting the 2012 Act.
Dr Huppert
I have no need to apologise, because I voted against it. I was actually about to give the hon. Gentleman credit for introducing this Bill, which I look forward to supporting, and for his role in opposing some of the things that the Labour Government did. Does he welcome the fact that the £800 million tender for older people’s services in Cambridgeshire stayed within the NHS? Does he also accept the concerns that many of us had about the contract at Hinchingbrooke that was put out to private tender by the last Labour Government? I am sure he would agree that that was a problem.
Clive Efford
It is just not realistic to compare what went on under the previous Labour Government with what is going on now. Yes, the contract in Cambridgeshire, at Peterborough, was won by an NHS bidder, but what was the cost? How much money was diverted from patient care into running that tendering process? That is an increasing cost to the NHS that we cannot allow to continue. By the way, I unreservedly withdraw my accusation that the hon. Gentleman voted in favour of the 2012 Act, because that is a calumny I would not use against my worst enemy.
Through the House, the Secretary of State would be accountable—
Philip Davies
I am delighted to help the hon. Gentleman out. Helpful as ever! He talks about stopping what he calls privatisation and about putting the Secretary of State in charge. At the moment, there is a cap on the amount of private income that a hospital trust can gain, but does he agree that clause 7 of his Bill would remove that cap, giving discretion to the Secretary of State? Does he acknowledge that the amount of private income a hospital could receive could actually go up under his Bill?
Clive Efford
There are a number of provisions relating to the Secretary of State which state that everything that is decided has to put patients first, rather than competition. That is the key difference in this Bill. The Secretary of State will have to be satisfied that every penny raised from private income serves the needs of patients. The Secretary of State will set the limit, which can be variable, but it will have to come down because this House will demand that.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Is it not true that, under this Government’s reorganisation, between £3 billion and £5 billion has been wasted as a result of tendering exercises?
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are too many examples of money being wasted on the tendering process.
Those who suggest that what the Labour Government did can be compared in any measure with what this coalition has inflicted on our national health service are completely misguided. When the Labour Government were elected in 1997, we spent 5.2% of our GDP on our health services. In 2010, we had increased that to 8.6%. We increased the number of doctors by 48,000. We increased the number of GPs by 5,000. We increased the number of training places for doctors, which had been cut by the previous Tory Government. We increased the number of nurses by 70,000. We had the biggest hospital building programme in the history of the national health service. We rebuilt or refurbished every accident and emergency department in the country. When Labour left office, the NHS had the highest satisfaction ratings from its patients that it had ever had in its history. The NHS was in crisis in 1997, and Labour saved it. It is in crisis again now.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that Labour also guaranteed the private sector a fixed slice of NHS income in a way that the Bill does not do?
Clive Efford
The hon. Gentleman was on the Bill Committee for the 2012 legislation, and I wonder how many amendments he tabled to put those issues right. And he has the cheek to come here and ask questions about my Bill, which seeks to put right what he did not attempt to put right when he was on that Committee.
John Robertson (Glasgow North West) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on getting this Bill to its Second Reading debate. The Government have been throwing all these facts and figures at us about how the number of doctors is increasing all the time, but these things started under Labour. It takes seven years for a doctor to be a decent practitioner, and we are the ones who made a start on this, not the Government.
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: the claim that this Government, whose top-down reorganisation has caused so much chaos in the national health service, are responsible for the standards of the NHS now is laughable. They claim to have turned the NHS around in a short space of time, but they are standing on the shoulders of the achievement of the previous Labour Government.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, and another way of putting it is as follows: we dragged the national health service, between 1997 and 2010, from the depths of degradation that the Tories left it in and hoisted it back to the pinnacles of achievement. I have got a united nations heart bypass to prove it—it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar, and these two people on the Bench behind me talk about sending them back. If you did that in the hospitals in London, half of Londoners would be dead in six months. Those are the facts about the United Kingdom Independence party.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing this Bill. Does he agree that the Liberal Democrats have got a brass neck in making criticisms, given that not only did they sit on their hands during that Bill Committee, but the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) was the prime advocate who led the Bill during its passage through Parliament?
Clive Efford
And then led a campaign to stop his local accident and emergency department closing, having done that for the Government.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on his Bill. He also carries the congratulations of 1,924 people from across Chesterfield who have signed a petition asking me to be here to support it. He is not just speaking with people behind him here; people right across the country are saying, “Thank you very much for what you are doing.”
Clive Efford
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s kind words and for the support of all the thousands of people, particularly health service staff, who have supported the Bill.
Clive Efford
I hope the hon. Gentleman does not mind, but I am going to make some progress.
Never before have we had market tendering of the health service as we have today, and it is breaking down our NHS. The Bill is not a solution to all the mistakes that this Government have made in their top-down restructuring of the NHS, but it is an important block on enforced privatisation. The argument can be simplified into two distinct sides. If people believe the NHS should be a pure market, open to competition regulations, where the interests of competition are put before those of patients, they belong on the side of the Government. If people believe the NHS is a public service that should be free of competition rules, where the interests of patients are put first, they should vote for the Bill today.
We know that No. 10 did not understand what was going on in 2012. The Chancellor was asleep at the wheel, and the Liberal Democrats, suffering from some form of terminal Stockholm syndrome, were led by the nose to turn the NHS from a public service into a free market. My Bill takes a scalpel to cut the heart out of the hated 2012 Act and put right the worst of the Government’s mistakes. It will remove the sections that require the tendering of NHS services for competition with the private sector, the result of which has been millions of pounds being diverted from patient care into the pockets of lawyers and accountants through the tendering process. NHS bodies are spending millions either bidding or managing bidding processes, and that is all money being diverted from patient care. That must stop, and this Bill will end it.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the Bill’s progress today. Does he agree with my constituent Julian Corlett, who expresses real concern that further privatisation would mean the NHS may be reduced simply to a brand and nothing more?
Clive Efford
Absolutely. It is the capacity of the NHS to continue to provide services in the future that is under threat. Eventually and inevitably, with continuing privatisation of all its services, the NHS will end up as just a patchwork of contracted-out services, and that will put us at the mercy of the private sector.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman talks about money being diverted away from patient care and about extended privatisation, but will he comment on the private finance initiatives that the previous Labour Government imposed right across the NHS, bankrupting many of its institutions and taking money away from patient care?
Clive Efford
There are issues about PFI, which we need to sort out. I must say, though, that the hon. Gentleman has picked on the wrong Member of Parliament. I have one of the very first PFIs in my local hospital. When was it advertised in the European Journal? In March 1995. It was a Tory PFI and it is one of the most expensive in the national health service; it is costing millions of pounds for my local hospital. Both Governments have something to answer for when it comes to PFI. There are issues that need to be put right, but people must understand that that will not happen under a Tory Government.
Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a good case. Is it not the truth that the one constant over the past quarter of a decade is that both Governments—they are equally matched in this—did not listen to the people who really knew about the NHS? I am talking about the people who work in the service. To be honest, our Government, to their shame, ignored the working people and those in the NHS who said do not go into PFI or foundation hospitals. Exactly the same thing happened in 2012 when the Tory party ignored the same voices of the people who were saying, “Don’t go ahead with this Act.” We should start listening to the people who know what they are doing—the people we rely on to deliver NHS services.
Clive Efford
All Governments have lessons to learn. This party is not saying that it has nothing to learn, but it wants to end the privatisation of the national health service. We must understand one thing: next May is when we have to fight to save our national health service. If we continue under this Act to keep privatising our services, we will not have a national health service as we understand it.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Like me, is my hon. Friend amazed by the faux indignation of some Government Members? Those Members will be the ones who will benefit from the donations of some of the private sector companies that are winning the contracts in our NHS service.
Clive Efford
We have seen the names—64 of them. We will see how they vote today, and then let the public know what they are doing with our national health service.
Clive Efford
I should like to make some progress. The Bill is in four parts. Part 1 deals with the powers and duties of the Secretary of State. It reinstates the legal duty of the Secretary of State to promote a comprehensive national health service. It gives powers of direction to the Secretary of State over NHS England and local commissioners. It also requires the Secretary of State to put the needs of patients above those of the providers, or the market within which providers operate. It also provides that all contracts will be deemed to be “NHS contracts”. The significance of that is that they will not be subject to competition rules. All complaints will be dealt with within the framework of the NHS, with the Secretary of State having the final say—not lawyers or the courts.
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and for securing this private Member’s Bill. One urgent issue that we must address is that of the purchaser/provider split. Will he assure us that the proposals in this part of the Bill will mean that health services can be run purely on health grounds?
Clive Efford
The Bill does not attempt to rid the NHS of the purchaser/provider split. That would require a new top-down reorganisation of the national health service, which people in the NHS say they do not want. What I can say is that this Bill will create a framework in which NHS contracts are not open to competition rules. As long as the commissioners of services stay within the confines of the NHS contracts, they will not be open to competition. They will be compelled to do that by sheer cost, because if they step outside of NHS contracts they are then into European competition rules and will have to spend millions on lawyers and accountants to oversee the tendering process.
Clive Efford
I shall make some progress before giving way again.
Part 2 deals with the private patient income. It empowers the Secretary of State to set the cap and reduce it from 49%. It also ensures that any income derived from private care is in the interests of NHS patients.
Part 3 gets to the core of the issue. It repeals the sections of the 2012 Act that require health service commissioners to put services out to tender, particularly the hated section 75. Clause 9 provides that no legally enforceable procurement obligations shall be imposed on NHS commissioners in relation to any arrangement that is proposed to take effect or takes effect by way of an NHS contract. It further provides that commissioners who place NHS contracts shall not be within the scope of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006.
That provision ensures that article 168(7) of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union is given proper effect in UK domestic law. The article states:
“Union action shall respect the responsibility of the Member States for the definition of their health policy and for the organisation and delivery of health services and medical care. The responsibilities of the Member States shall include the management of health services and medical care and the allocation of resources assigned to them.”
This provision prevents the market from interfering in mergers of services and makes it clear that the disposal of assets will require the permission of the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State will exercise his duties in the interests of patients.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making one of the best speeches we have heard in this Parliament about protecting our national health service. Does he agree that another way we could prevent private providers from competing in the national health service would be by persuading this Tory Government to exclude the national health service and other public services from the transatlantic trade and investment partnership negotiations?
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend has guessed the next part of my speech. Part 4 of the Bill deals with TTIP. I have heard some criticisms that the Bill does not protect the NHS from TTIP. Clause 14 reads:
“No ratification… of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Treaty shall cause any legally enforceable procurement or competition obligations to be imposed on any NHS body entering into any arrangement for the provision of health services in any part of the health service.”
There are differing legal views on whether the proposed TTIP will or will not impose legally enforceable procurement or competition obligations on the NHS. However, without this clause the question of which set of highly paid lawyers is right will be decided only after the treaty is signed and will be a decision for the courts, not the elected Government. I am sure that is music to the ears of Government Members.
Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making a tremendous speech. Will he confirm that clause 14 is absolutely crucial across the United Kingdom, including Scotland, given the potential impact of TTIP?
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; TTIP is a UK treaty, negotiated by the UK Government, and it will affect England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend may be aware that in response to a question I asked him this Monday, the Prime Minister indicated that he thought the health service would not be affected. He seemed to be suggesting that he did not want it to be affected. If that is the case, surely his Government should be supporting this provision to ensure that does not happen.
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We know that the Prime Minister has accepted it was a mistake, so the Government’s position on the Bill is a bit curious.
Albert Owen
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this Second Reading debate. He made an important point about the provisions applying across the United Kingdom: Wales, where the policies are different from those operating across England, would still come under the TTIP agreement, so it is important that this clause is included.
Clive Efford
Absolutely essential. The question for the House is whether that policy issue should be decided by Parliament or the courts. Clause 14 is either unnecessary or essential, depending which set of lawyers ends up being proved correct. We say it should be a decision for Parliament, not the courts. Clause 14 puts the matter beyond doubt.
The public must decide whom they trust with the NHS. Do they believe the Tories who say they will protect it? After all, the Tories said there would be no top-down reorganisation, they said there would be no closure of A and E departments, and they said there would be no closure of maternity units except where local people agreed.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene, in addition to my main function today, which is to provide a cordon sanitaire. [Laughter.] I am very pleased that my name appears on the Bill as one of its supporters because nowhere is it more apparent than in west London what the Tories mean for the NHS. Two A and E departments closed, and within weeks up to a third of patients were not seen within four hours at A and E. Does my hon. Friend agree that unless we get rid of all this Tory legislation, the NHS will not survive?
Clive Efford
My hon. Friend is right. Before the election the Tories said that they would seek the agreement of local people in decision making, but in south-east London in 2007 my local health managers published a document called “A Picture of Health”. It was drawn up by doctors, nurses and midwives. They held a conference and reviewed all our services. They came to politicians like me and said, “We want you to behave sensibly. This is about improving the quality of care for patients, but at A and E it is also about saving lives.” Just before a general election, it is quite a thing for people to say, “We’re going to close one of your A and Es.” I differed with the health managers over which A and E should close, but when clinicians come and say, “We can save lives and improve quality of care,” we have to listen.
That is what the Government said they would do. What happened? The then shadow Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), came to the A and E proposed for closure in “A Picture of Health”, marched around the area and told local people, “We’re not going to close your A and E.” What happened then? The Tories got into Government and closed the A and E. In London they put nine out of 31 A and E departments under threat, then they attempted to force the closure of Lewisham A and E. When they were beaten off by local people, they took powers to themselves to close it over the heads of local people.
Now, my constituents who get in an ambulance are handed a leaflet that says, “If you come from SE9 or SE3, you can’t go to the local A and E at the Queen Elizabeth.” Where do they have to go? You guessed it: Lewisham. But Lewisham A and E would not have been there if the Government had had their way. On top of that, the Care Quality Commission has condemned A and Es in our area because of lack of resources and lack of capacity. At the same time the CQC commended the staff for their dedication in keeping the service running, yet the Government would have closed Lewisham A and E. So, what of their pre-election commitment not to do anything over the heads of local people or local health managers?
Do we believe the Tories when they say the NHS is safe in their hands? [Hon. Members: “No.”] To defend the NHS, one has to believe in the founding values that led to its creation. Our NHS treats everyone equally—from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. Are these the values of the party that gave us the poll tax or the bedroom tax, or the party that plunges thousands of disabled people into poverty by denying them benefits and forcing them through an unending cycle of appeals to get what they are entitled to?
Throughout history working-class people have had to fight to assert the undeniable truth that all men and women are created equal. From the very first poll tax rebellions, John Ball asked:
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
He educated common people that they were all created equal. It is a theme that working-class people have been forced to return to throughout the centuries, whether through Christianity or a political fight for social justice from the Levellers to the Diggers, from Thomas Paine and the Chartists to the trade union movement today. These are the people who fought for the values that created the national health service. There is nothing in our society today that embodies those values more than our national health service. It is these values that cannot be defended by a party that talks about fairness while it justifies the bedroom tax and measures people’s worth. That is not what our NHS does.
This Bill will not solve all the problems in our national health service—it will take a Labour Government to rescue it from a crisis—but it is an essential step in rebuilding our national health service.
Mr Speaker, I do not beg to move that this Bill be read; I demand it be read, on behalf of NHS patients, on behalf of the staff—the nurses, the doctors, the support staff, the carers, the volunteers. On behalf of everyone who holds our national health service dear, I move that this Bill be read a Second time.
Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on introducing his Bill and on the robust candour with which he did so. I am only sorry that he was displaced from his usual perch in the House. However, I am confident that when, after the next general election, the Labour party finds itself again in opposition on those Benches, Labour Members will not have to share them with the UK Independence party because we will have won those seats back.
I can understand why, when there was a coalition Government at the start of this Parliament, the Liberal party wanted, as a condition of the entering into the coalition Government, a five-year fixed-term Parliament. However, one of the difficulties and drawbacks of five-year fixed-term Parliaments is that we have some of the longest general election campaigns ever, and that makes it quite difficult to differentiate substantive and serious political points and what is essentially electioneering. I can just imagine the hon. Gentleman making that speech on a wet Thursday evening during the general election campaign in the trades hall somewhere on Eltham high street.
Sir Oliver Heald
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is good to hear an authentic south London voice speaking up for Labour values rather than the snooty lot from north London who manage the party now?
Sir Tony Baldry
Yes, but the first point I want to make is this. We need to be careful about what we say about the NHS in the run-up to general elections. The first general election campaign that I was seriously involved in was back in 1966. In every one since then, there has been a period when the Labour party has run around saying things along the lines of “24 hours to save the NHS.” That is very destabilising, as was evidenced today in a letter to a national newspaper by Dr Michael Dixon, the chairman of the NHS Alliance, and a number of other GPs, in which they say:
“As NHS doctors, we are deeply concerned about the misguided and potentially disruptive National Health Service Bill being debated today.
The Bill’s proponents claim it will remove competition from the NHS and guard against ‘privatisation’ by repealing key clauses of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.
We believe this would be a backwards step for patient care, reorganising the NHS in a top-down way at a time when it needs to be looking ahead to the huge challenges of the future. These were set out in the NHS England Five Year Forward View, and we urge all politicians to support it rather than using the NHS as a political football.
Suggesting that GP commissioners have a ‘privatisation agenda’ is an ill-informed attack on the clinical leadership which improves services and helps patients.”
I agree. It is disappointing if politicians use the NHS as a political football.
The NHS is an enduring part of the post-war consensus on the welfare state. That consensus was agreed on by everyone who had gone through the deprivations of the second world war, had lived through the blitz, and were determined that there would be a better Britain. The NHS was supported by everyone, including Archbishop Temple, a brilliant Archbishop of Canterbury, who was the person who first coined the phrase “the welfare state”.
I have always been interested in the NHS, not least because both my parents became part of the NHS on its very first day. When it came into being in 1948, my father was a recently qualified registrar and my mother was a theatre sister, having served as a theatre nurse during the Coventry blitz. My parents spent the whole of their working lives in the NHS: my father went on to become the research secretary of the British Tuberculosis Association and a chest and heart specialist, and my mother went on to become a sister tutor.
The other reason I have always been extremely interested in the success of the NHS is that, in the nearly third of a century I have been fortunate to be the Member of Parliament for north Oxfordshire, the most important issue in my constituency has probably been the position of Horton general hospital and the retention of its services.
I have left instructions in my will that my body should go to the anatomy department of the university of Oxford, partly because there is quite a lot of it for them to work on, but also because I feel that the liver of anybody who has been an MP for nearly a third of a century must be worthy of some anatomical research. I am also determined that when they open me up, they will discover engraved on my heart, “Keep the Horton general.”
What we heard from the hon. Member for Eltham was a litany of gloom in the NHS, but Horton general hospital now has more consultants than at any time in its and the NHS’s history. The Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust employs 11,598 staff, including 1,800 doctors and 3,600 nurses. It is important to make clear that, since 2010, the number of patients seen by the trust, including at Horton, has increased significantly. There has been a 19% increase in elected in-patient admissions, a 9% increase in emergency in-patient admissions, a 24% increase in day-care admissions and a 12% increase in out-patient attendances. Those are significant increases in just over four years, so the NHS continues to treat more out-patients and in-patients.
Over the past two years, the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust has managed completely to eliminate its financial deficit and increase the amount paid to the Oxfordshire clinical commissioning group, such that the group finished the year with a surplus. Most importantly, over the past couple of years the trust has managed to create 400 new jobs, almost all of them new doctors and new nursing posts. Sir Jonathan Michael and his team deserve considerable congratulations on managing to balance the finances of the trust and securing a large number of new medical and nursing posts.
Clive Efford
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that all those things would have been achievable had the level of funding for the NHS continued at the rate we inherited in 1997 and had Labour not almost tripled the amount of GDP put into our health services?
Sir Tony Baldry
Every Government have invested money in the NHS, and quite rightly so. This Government have invested real-terms increases in the NHS, as evidenced by the Commonwealth Fund, which compares health systems internationally. It found this year that, although the United States health care system is the most expensive in the world, it underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. The fund studied 11 nations: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The United States ranks last, but who ranks first as the best health care system in the world? The United Kingdom. We should all, wherever we sit in this House, be proud that we have the best health care system in the world.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
The picture is not quite as rosy as my right hon. Friend paints it, is it? Even The Guardian newspaper reported that the Commonwealth Fund survey showed that the
“only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.”
Sir Tony Baldry
I am not entirely sure what point my hon. Friend is trying to make. The fact is that the Commonwealth Fund found that the NHS is the best health care system in the world. I hope that he and everyone in the House takes pride in that. The NHS has many challenges—we are all conscious that with an ageing demography and advances in medical technology, every health care system faces challenges—but we should take pride in being the best.
We also need to be honest about what has gone before. There was an enormous amount of rewriting of history and revisionism in the speech of the hon. Member for Eltham. For those of us who have been in the House for some time, it may be worth looking back and reminding ourselves about what happened in the not-too-distant past.
In the introduction to the NHS plan of July 2000, the then Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn, wrote:
“This NHS Plan sets out the steps we now need to take to transform the health service so that it is redesigned around the needs of patients. It means tackling the toughest issues that have been ducked for too long.”
I do not think anyone would ever disagree with that as a statement of intent. He went on:
“For the first time the NHS and the private sector will work more closely together not just to build new hospitals but to provide NHS patients with the operations they need.”
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
I am big fan of the NHS. It is my NHS too. I was badly hurt in the Army in 1997, and the NHS sent me to get fixed as a private patient, because the NHS could not do it. I am very grateful to the NHS. That was under a Labour Government, and I hope such a scheme continues.
Sir Tony Baldry
My hon. Friend makes his own point very well in his own way. It is important for all of us to remember that the NHS is our NHS and our constituents’ NHS. It does not belong to any particular political party; it is a national heath service.
Alan Milburn concluded that the “major reforms”, which included working more closely with the private sector, would
“deliver real benefits for NHS patients”.
Chapter 11 of the NHS plan of July 2000, on “Changes in the relationship between the NHS and the private sector”, said:
“The NHS is a huge organisation. Using extra capacity and extra investment from voluntary and private sector providers can benefit NHS patients… The time has now come for the NHS to engage more constructively with the private sector”.
Under the heading, “The basis for a new relationship”, it went on:
“Ideological boundaries or institutional barriers should not stand in the way of better care for NHS patients…By constructing the right partnerships the NHS can harness the capacity of private and voluntary providers to treat more NHS patients…Under our proposals a patient would remain an NHS patient even if they were being treated in the private sector. NHS care will remain free at the point of delivery, whether care is provided by an NHS hospital, a local GP, a private sector hospital or by a voluntary organisation.”
John Pugh
The right hon. Gentleman is outlining a thread of continuity very well. Is it not strange that the principal adviser to Alan Milburn has now been appointed by this Government as the head of NHS England? Does that not show that there has been continuity from one Government to another with the same policies?
Sir Tony Baldry
I would hope, with an organisation like the NHS, that it would not become a political football—that there would be considerable continuity. The fact that the person now in post worked with a Labour Government on NHS proposals is a strong point rather than a weak one.
Mr Brian H. Donohoe (Central Ayrshire) (Lab)
I am wondering whether the right hon. Gentleman supports or opposes the Bill, because he has been speaking for some time and has not made that clear.
Sir Tony Baldry
The point I am making, which I shall develop, is that the Bill is completely unnecessary. I also want to make the point that all Opposition Members seem to wish to deny that there has been any involvement of the NHS with the private sector. It is important to remind the House of the fact that it was the Labour party, and a Labour Government, who introduced the private sector into the NHS, and the 2012 legislation in no way significantly changed that relationship.
Philip Davies
Does my right hon. Friend agree that those people who support the Bill would be supporting the removal of the cap on the amount of private income that hospitals can receive? Does he think that, when 38 Degrees was encouraging people to write in about the Bill, it made that clear to the people who signed its petition?
Sir Tony Baldry
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I think the Labour party will regret signing up to every 38 Degrees campaign, because if 38 Degrees starts drafting the Labour party manifesto rather than the Labour party, the Labour party will never sort out whether it is new Labour, old Labour or any other sort of Labour, which is why it did so incredibly badly yesterday in the Rochester by-election.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman has just made a comment that cannot go unchallenged. He claims that the relationship that this Government have with the private sector is the same as that of the previous Government. That is absolute rubbish. When his Government’s legislation went through, he said that doctors would decide. Doctors throughout the country are now saying that they are mandated to put services out to the open market under section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012—his Government’s legislation. That was not the case under the previous Government. If this Government are just doing the same as the previous Government, why did they need a 300-page Bill to rewrite the legal basis of the national health service?
Sir Tony Baldry
May I remind the right hon. Gentleman of a document published on 31 October 2000, under the last Labour Government? The printout that I have is entitled, “A Concordat with the Private and Voluntary Health Care Provider Sector”. It is headed, “Socialist Health Association—Promoting health and well-being through the application of socialist principles”. It was a concordat introduced by the previous Government with the private and voluntary health care sector. It says:
“Introduction. There should be no organisational or ideological barriers to the delivery of high quality healthcare free at the point of delivery to those who need it, when they need it. The Government”—
the last Labour Government—
“has entered into this concordat with the Independent Healthcare Association to set out the parameters for a partnership between the NHS and private and voluntary health care providers. It describes a partnership approach that enables NHS patients in England to be treated free in the private and voluntary health care sector.
The key tests for any relationship between the NHS and private and voluntary health care providers is that it must represent good value for money for the tax payer and assure high standards of care for the patient. The involvement of private and voluntary health care providers in the planning of local health care services at an early stage will enable the NHS to use a wider range of health facilities within their locality. To achieve this Health Authorities in their strategic leadership role will be expected to ensure that local private and voluntary health care providers are involved in the processes designed to develop the local Health Improvement Programme as appropriate.”
And it carries on. The document is headed, by the last Labour Government, “Socialist Health Association…A Concordat with the Private and Voluntary Health Care…Sector”. Indeed, the last Labour Secretary of State for Health signed a concordat with the Independent Healthcare Association on 31 October 2000.
The decision to make greater use of private sector facilities for NHS patients did not require new legislation and it was possible to undertake it within the existing legislation on the NHS, but for the avoidance of doubt let me quote the Labour party manifesto from 2001. In the chapter on NHS reform, Labour promised to
“work with the private sector to use spare capacity, where it makes sense, for NHS patients”
and to
“create a new type of hospital—specially built surgical units, managed by the NHS or the private sector—to guarantee shorter waiting times”.
In my constituency, we have an independent orthopaedic treatment centre run by the private sector and introduced under the Labour Government. We have a Darzi walk-in centre run by private GPs, which was also introduced during the time of the Labour Government.
Mr Anderson
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way in his long diatribe. He quotes the 2001 Labour manifesto, but it also said that any relationship with the private sector would not be at the expense of the terms and conditions of the staff working in the private sector who were transferred out. Today, Care UK people who work in Doncaster are facing a 40% cut in their take-home pay. Does he not see that that is one of the consequences of the Health and Social Care Act 2012?
Sir Tony Baldry
With respect, I think the hon. Gentleman is seeking to avoid the point, which is that the 2012 Act did not fundamentally change the situation in the NHS between the public and private sectors. I draw the House’s attention to a debate that took place in Westminster Hall in 2002 on the subject of the private sector in the NHS that was initiated by the then Chair of the Select Committee on Health, the then Member for Wakefield, David Hinchliffe. The Minister, John Hutton, made a speech in response that could easily have been made in identical terms by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). John Hutton said:
“I do not want to repeat arguments that have already been made about the future of our relationship with the private sector, but I shall deal with some more specific points. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield was concerned about whether reference costs provide a sufficient measure of value for money in the NHS. We accept that they do not, and we have tried to set out in our report several ways in which we can strengthen reference cost data.”
He went on to say:
“My hon. Friend also referred to the evidence that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State gave to the Committee. He set out four essential tests that we apply to each prospective partnership in the NHS and private sector. Is it in the interests of patients? Is it consistent with the local and national strategies of the NHS? Is it value for money? Is it consistent with public sector values, including that treatment is determined by clinical need and staff are treated fairly? Those are the yardsticks by which we will judge and develop our relationship with the private sector. Provided that those tests are satisfied, we should use the private and voluntary sector where it has a track record of achievement or where it can offer clear potential gains.”—[Official Report, 11 July 2002; Vol. 388, c. 354WH.]
I have absolutely no doubt that those are views that my hon. Friend the Minister would endorse today. It is an entirely sensible approach to how the NHS and the private and independent sector should work. The National Health Service Bill passed during the Session of 2005-06 further enshrined the relationship between the national health service and the private sector in statute.
The Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Eltham misses the point. The Health and Social Care Act did not and does not introduce competition into the NHS, it does not change the rules on when to tender competitively and there is no requirement to tender all services. What it does do is manage the competition that has been introduced.
Clive Efford
If the Act did not introduce competition to the NHS, will the right hon. Gentleman explain the following? Bristol hospital wanted to restructure its head and neck cancer surgery service. Monitor considered the proposal and concluded that it was likely to improve the quality of service to patients, but that
“the merger removes important competitive constraints for elective head and neck, ENT, OMF, urology and symptomatic breast care services in the absence of other competitors”.
In effect, it said that the restructuring could have improved the quality of care, but that because it would have removed competition, it could not go ahead.
Sir Tony Baldry
The hon. Gentleman misunderstands my point. The Act did not introduce competition into the NHS because that competition had already been introduced by the previous Labour Government, who introduced greater private sector involvement in the NHS. Labour made binding rules to manage the competition, and the Act continued that approach with an expert health sector regulator working in the best interests of patients. Removing Monitor as the health sector regulator would merely leave commissioners facing actions through the courts under Labour’s own 2006 procurement regulations, which I do not think would be in the best interests of patients.
Andy Burnham
I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman has undermined his entire speech with the ignorance he has displayed in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). For the first time in the history of the NHS, the Act gave a role to the competition authorities, under the Enterprise Act 2002, in taking precisely the kind of action that my hon. Friend referred to. I am very surprised the right hon. Gentleman does not know that; may I suggest that he does not know what he is talking about?
Sir Tony Baldry
We heard that argument during the passage of the Act, and it is simply wrong. It is wrong to suggest that somehow the Act opened the door to competition.
Sir Oliver Heald
I wonder if my right hon. Friend shares my consternation at the shadow Secretary of State’s remarks, given that throughout the 2000s, all we heard from Labour, John Hutton and the other Ministers he has mentioned was the importance of value for money and tendering for things. They are going back to the days of the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) being in charge.
Sir Tony Baldry
My hon. and learned Friend makes a very good point. There is confusion about whether we have got new Labour or old Labour. The Labour party has to set out how it would undo the market it created without further top-down reorganisation. It could not do it simply by removing the health rules that manage it. There has been no change on when to tender competitively; the rules on procurement are the same as those used by the previous Government. The Act makes it clear that the Secretary of State remains politically accountable to the NHS. The changes in the Bill would restrict the greater autonomy given to the NHS and inhibit staff from making the innovative changes needed to secure sustainable, high-quality care for patients. In particular, it would tie the hands of clinical leaders on CCGs, which the NHS England five-year forward view says should have more powers, not fewer.
Grahame M. Morris
The right hon. Gentleman is engaging in a lengthy filibuster, in my opinion. I served on the Committee for the 2012 Act, and a plethora of organisations pointed out during the passage of that Bill the folly of what the Government were doing. They introduced a lengthy Bill; we spent 40 sittings in Committee; they tabled more than 1,000 amendments to their own Bill; it had 20 different sections; part 3 introduced Monitor. To suggest to the House that that Act introduced no change to the system operated under Labour is—well, it is not disingenuous, but it is not correct. I am not sure what term is best to use.
Sir Tony Baldry
During the passage of that Bill, the Labour party and certain organisations, including some trade unions, sought to rewrite history. Interestingly, when Labour introduced things such as the independent treatment centres, the Darzi centres and the 2002 concordat, the trade unions that rallied to support the hon. Gentleman in Committee were totally silent. I do not think it lies in the mouth of those organisations, which did not complain when the Labour party introduced a partnership and a concordat with the independent and voluntary sector when it was in government, now to complain, simply because it is the Conservative party in a coalition Government, that we are somehow “privatising” the NHS. It is simply not true.
Sir Tony Baldry
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once, and as the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) accused me, ungallantly and unfairly, of filibustering—even though everything I have said is relevant and to the point—I would like now to make a little more progress and come to my final point, or almost my final point.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. It is not possible for the right hon. Gentleman to filibuster, because if he was not in order, I would not allow him to continue speaking.
Sir Tony Baldry
I know that; you know that, Madam Deputy Speaker; I just wanted to make quite sure that the hon. Gentlemen below the Gangway knew that I was speaking relevantly.
I want to say something about the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. This is another of those things that people run around saying will be the end of civilisation as we know it. The transatlantic trade and investment partnership will not change the fact that it is up to the UK Government alone to decide how UK public services, including the NHS, are run. Any assertion that TTIP will undermine the NHS is a complete red herring. The position has been confirmed by both the European and the US negotiators, and indeed the chair of the all-party group on European Union-United States trade and investment. Excluding health from the agreement would prevent our pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors from benefiting from TTIP.
As we approach the next general election, I hope the Labour party will not treat the NHS as a political football. I hope we will not see, as we have at every general election since I have been an adult, the Labour party running around saying that it has 24 hours to save the NHS or that the Conservative party is seeking to privatise it, which is completely and utterly untrue. We all have a collective interest in ensuring that our NHS continues to be the best health care service in the world. There are huge challenges ahead for health care in this country, with an ageing population and ever-increasing improvements in medical technology. We should be facing up to those changes in an adult and responsible way. The Labour party should not be reneging on the clear commitments it made in both legislation and policy when it was in government. This Bill is totally unnecessary and it should not pass.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry). He made an attempt to make a serious speech, but his 30 minutes were based on one argument that is fundamentally wrong, which is that this Government have made no changes to the basis of the NHS in this country. These 457 pages of his Government’s legislation show that that is wrong. If he looks at sections 72, 73 and 80 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, he will see that the Competition Act 1998, the Enterprise Act 2002 and the Office of Fair Trading are brought into play for the first time in our NHS.
So why no Tory apology to NHS staff, patients and the public? Why no Tory apology to NHS staff for forcing through the largest internal reorganisation in 65 years of NHS history and for forcing them to cope with increasing confusion, complex bureaucracy and wasted cost? Why no Tory apology to the public for an NHS that they now see has longer waiting lists and service cuts? Why no Tory apology to the public for breaking election promises and the terms of the coalition agreement to stop top-down reorganisations of the NHS, which have often got in the way of patient care? Finally, while we are at it, why no apology to this House for the way we were misled about the reorganisation and the legislation in 2010 and 2011, which became the 457-page Health and Social Care Act 2012?
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I will tell the right hon. Gentleman why there has been no apology: because there is nothing to apologise for. That is the simple reason. We have a better health service now than we had before; that is why there has been no apology.
John Healey
Patients say exactly the opposite of what the hon. Gentleman has just argued. However, I understand that he feels he has nothing to apologise for. If he fundamentally believes that the NHS should be a system based on full-blown competition, delivered by the private sector, then of course he would want to legislate in that way.
Philip Davies
While the right hon. Gentleman is going back to fighting some 1980s ideological warfare, I think most constituents are bothered about what happens in practice. Is he really asking me to apologise to my constituents for the fact that there are now 9% more professionally qualified clinical staff at Bradford teaching hospital and 42% fewer senior managers, or that there are 7% more professionally qualified clinical staff at Airedale NHS Foundation Trust and 14% fewer managers, or, I might add, for the brand spanking new, state-of-the-art A and E department at Airedale hospital? Does he really think that is something to apologise for?
John Healey
The hon. Gentleman normally finds a common touch in the way he makes his points. I have to tell him that if he tries to trot out those sorts of figures on the doorstep in the next five months, he will find that they cut no ice with the public, because they know what is happening to their NHS day to day, and we will make sure they understand why it is happening.
John Healey
I will give way to the hon. and learned Gentleman and then make some progress.
Sir Oliver Heald
Why should I apologise for the £150 million of investment in Lister hospital in Stevenage or the £98 million in Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge—fantastic, world-beating facilities?
John Healey
We on the Labour Benches cannot wait for the debate on the NHS to be put right at the heart of the next five months of policy and political debate, and my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State will make sure that happens.
Let me return to my point about the way that we in this House were misled about the reorganisation and the legislation. I am disappointed to see that the man who led it, the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), is not in the Chamber today to explain himself. He argued—it was completely wrong, but he argued it—in the debate on Second Reading in January 2011:
“It is about gearing the entire system towards supporting the relationship between doctor and patient”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2011; Vol. 522, c. 617.]
Of course, it was not and it is not. As I argued, at the time from the Opposition Front Bench:
“The reorganisation and legislation is designed to break up the NHS, to open up all areas of the NHS to private health companies, to remove requirements for proper openness, scrutiny and accountability to the public and to Parliament, and make the NHS subject to both UK and European competition law.”—[Official Report, 16 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 378.]
The Government were and are driving free market political ideology through the heart of our NHS.
The arguments that those of us on the Opposition Benches made then are those that we make now, and that my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) makes especially strongly from our Front Bench. That is why the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) has introduced is so essential and why I am so pleased and proud to be one of his sponsors.
Grahame M. Morris
My right hon. Friend made some powerful points when the Health and Social Care Act 2012 was going through Parliament, when Tory Members were denying the purpose of the legislation. He quoted the last Health Secretary, but the current Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), said in a book:
“Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public health provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain”.
What could be a more succinct and clear expression of their intentions?
John Healey
My hon. Friend has been a strong champion of the NHS and followed this issue from day one of this Parliament. To answer directly his question of what could be more succinct and clear, I suspect that when we hear from the new Member for UKIP, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) or his colleague, the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell)—given some of the things that they have argued should be the basis of the NHS in future—they will make the vision of the right hon. Member for South West Surrey look positively UKIP-lite.
This Bill is essential because it starts to correct the three fundamental flaws, brought about by the reorganisation legislation, that are now driving the NHS. We could call them the three Cs—cost, complexity and competition.
On cost, the scale of the reorganisation was simply huge. As the chief executive of the NHS said at the time, it was
“beyond anything that anybody from the public or private sector has witnessed”.
The cost of the waste has been huge. We reckoned beforehand that it was about £2 billion; we now reckon £3 billion. What is clear is that getting on for £1 billion has been paid out in redundancies, much of which was to staff who were paid off and then re-hired by our NHS.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
Could my right hon. Friend say what steps were taken to publish the risk assessment during the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill?
John Healey
I did not want to open up all the old arguments that we fought in 2010-11, though it was extraordinary to see the extreme lengths to which the Government went—seen before only on matters of military information—to stop the disclosure of the risk register about the potential impact and likely consequences of their policy. My hon. Friend was a great supporter of mine in trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to allow the public and this House to see the terms of what the Government knew could happen to the NHS if they passed the legislation.
My second C is complexity. NHS services are now so much harder to plan and so much harder to hold to account because of the changes the Government have made. We saw new national quangos responsible for tens of billions of pounds of spending of public money in each and every one of our local areas in England. The commissioning role, which was previously undertaken by one body, the primary care trust, is now fragmented with at least five different bodies trying to do the same job.
On the third C, competition, the Secretary of State has his foot lightly on the accelerator of privatisation for now, but let us make no mistake, if the Tories win the next election, he will press it hard down to the floor immediately afterwards. Even though they are soft-pedalling on the privatisation that their Act put in place, we have seen in the 18 months since it came into force 131 contracts won by companies such as Care UK, Virgin Care and BUPA. According to the NHS Support Federation, that is already valued at £2.6 billion. At that win rate, the contracts already currently advertised will mean another £6.6 billion in the private sector—getting on for 10% of our NHS run by private companies in private hands.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
Has it come as any surprise and is it just a coincidence that the very companies securing these major contracts are six-figure donors to the Tory party?
John Healey
It comes as no surprise, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for underlining that point. I was not planning to make that point, but I am glad that it has been made so clearly.
My argument is with the Prime Minister. So much for what he said, and so much for his word when he said back in 2011 that
“we will not be selling off the NHS”.
Perhaps the most serious consequence of this fragmentation, this privatisation and this contractualisation is the fact that the most important and fundamental value at the heart of the NHS—an imperative at its heart—is the ability properly to plan, co-ordinate and deliver services. That is being made much harder, as the Health Select Committee has said, and sometimes impossible by the operation of the Health and Social Care Act and competition law. If anybody doubts it, they should look at the case of the two NHS trusts—the Royal Bournemouth and the Poole NHS Trusts—whose merger made great sense to patients, but was prevented by this Government’s legislation.
Let me say a few words about the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. I have chaired the all-party group that has followed these negotiations for the last 18 months in order to try to encourage a better and more balanced public and parliamentary understanding and debate, as well as to put the Government on the spot and hold them to account for what they are doing. We are trying to ensure that if we get a deal, it will bring real benefits not just to British business, but to British workers and British consumers.
Two things have become clear. First, the NHS can be fully protected in TTIP. I am convinced of this, not just because other EU trade agreements have protected public services, but because if the Government want them, there are specific member state reservations to cover public services and because we have heard the confirmation, directly from the chief negotiator whom I have met twice about this, that even with ISDS—investor-state dispute settlement—provisions, which I do not support, nothing could prevent a future Labour Government from bringing parts of the NHS now in private hands back into public hands.
The second thing that has become clear is that these commitments have been secured despite, not because of, Government Ministers. It is clear that Ministers have done next to nothing to try to influence the negotiations and secure the full exclusion and protection we require for our NHS and wider public services. Indeed, rather as the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) observed, the Minister for Trade and Investment, Lord Livingston, who is responsible in government for leading the British position, has said that he would welcome the inclusion of health services in any deal. When the Minister gets up to speak, perhaps he will—formally, in this House—make the Government’s position clear. What is clear is that if we are properly to protect our NHS in any future TTIP, we must have a strong British voice in Brussels, which we do not have at the moment.
Sheila Gilmore
I gave the Prime Minister an opportunity on Monday to say that he would take specific action to ensure that the NHS would be protected if TTIP were successfully negotiated. He did not do so, but does my right hon. Friend feel that this debate provides an opportunity for that to be done in his name?
John Healey
I would expect these trade negotiations to stretch into at least the end of next year, so I hope and expect that the responsibility for making sure that this deal is good for Britain will become that of a Labour, not a Tory, Government and of Labour Ministers, not Tory Ministers.
John Healey
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman before finishing on the issue of the Prime Minister, which my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) has just raised.
Jonathan Edwards
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for making a very important point about TTIP. I know that the Scottish Government want the Scottish health service excluded and I would hope that the Welsh Government would have the same position. Is there not an onus on the UK Government to make those representations on behalf of the devolved Governments?
John Healey
Indeed. There is an onus, a responsibility and, I would argue, a duty on British Ministers to make those representations and to secure those protections in any deal for the whole of the UK.
Finally, the Prime Minister made his most personal pledges before the last election to protect the NHS and to stop top-down reorganisations. He has broken those pledges to the British people, and the damage that he and his Tory Ministers have inflicted through this NHS reorganisation and legislation has been unwanted, wasteful and wrong. It will fall to a Labour Government, after May, to put right this damage and to rescue the NHS, as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham said in his opening speech, just as we did in 1997. This Bill—it is why I am pleased and proud to support it—is an essential step towards doing that, but the election of a Labour Government must follow if we are to do the job properly.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), and I agree with most of what he said, but probably not the conclusion.
It gives me pleasure that we are having this debate. I think we all accept that the Bill will not go right the way through Parliament and end up on the statute book by 2015. We know what will happen: private Members’ Bills are lining up behind one another, and most of them will hit the buffers. However, the Bill moves the NHS debate up a notch.
It is fashionable at the moment to regard the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as a disastrous mistake. In fact, I believe that view is now shared in the Treasury. I did not support the Act, and not for the usual reasons—that it was not in the manifesto or the coalition agreement and was sprung upon Parliament. Those were good reasons, but they were not my main reason, nor was it because I am awkward or I thought it was a good career move. It was not because I did not see some of the upside, which I am sure the Minister will rehearse later—the emphasis on public health, clinical involvement, health inequality and mental health, and a smidgen of democratic accountability.
My main reason for opposing the Lansley Bill was that I saw it as the logical conclusion of a trend that began under Mrs Thatcher, was carried on by Blair and survives to this day. That trend, fundamentally, is an attempt to run the NHS as a market—not a real market, of course, but an internal market; a funny sort of Alice in Wonderland market with none of the advantages of a real market and most of the downside. It is one where everything is free, but prices, wages and policies are set by the Government; where NHS bodies compete not just against the private sector but against one another; where, as others have said, integration and real efficiency often go out of the window; where strategic leadership just does not seem to exist, as the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne said; where we struggle to deliver not products, as in ordinary markets, but entitlements; and where half the NHS, which we call commissioners, is billing the other half, which we call producers—that point has already been made—and bean-counters proliferate on either side and lock horns over bills.
In my view, the Health and Social Care Act was not so much about privatisation, or private industry helping to deliver NHS services—that was already happening under Labour—but primarily about marketisation. Some of course see that as a conspiracy—marketisation as the prelude to total privatisation—but I have to tell hon. Members that marketisation as a faith is still very much around, including on the Front Benches of most political parties, and is supported by practically every health think-tank we talk to.
The market, external or internal, tweak it as we may, simply cannot deliver entitlements and the moral objectives of the NHS in anything like an efficient manner. It cannot deliver to people the care that they need regardless of their means. Worse still, it solves none of the current problems of the NHS, which were largely parked in 2010—the financial pressures on the acute sector, which have come back to haunt us recently; the poor integration of services, which we have still not got right; and the separation of health and social care, which is unfinished business.
If I have a proposal to put to the House, it is that I would like to see the commissioner-provider split ended. That has been mentioned already. We moved an amendment at the Liberal Democrat conference to try to see whether and how that could be permitted. I would like to see the creation of local health boards, charged with integrating services and running them efficiently.
Dr Huppert
The amendment my hon. Friend is talking about was proposed by Cambridge Liberal Democrats, and I pay particular tribute to Councillor Kilian Bourke, who chairs the health committee in Cambridgeshire. It suggested allowing NHS commissioners and providers in a local area to form an integrated health organisation if that was what they wanted to do. Does my hon. Friend agree that that would achieve the benefits that he and I seek without the need to force through a massive top-down reorganisation? Would he urge the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) to accept such an amendment if the Bill made progress?
John Pugh
If the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) wished to talk about that, we could happily move away from the internal market where local circumstances required and demanded it. That would be an entirely sensible policy. I see no reason, though, why health boards should not procure goods and services based on simple best-value principles without all the competition legislation that has been vilified in the debate. They should be funded—as most services are—by capitation and according to local need, and they should be in some way democratically accountable, and I think we can get a genuine public service element back into the NHS. However, not every political party is advocating that at the moment, and some are steering in quite the opposite direction.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful speech, as is typical of him. Does he agree that what we are dealing with today is an Opposition party in desperate straits that knows exactly what it is doing in using the word “privatisation”? It knows that people out in the country associate it with having to buy private health care, but actually nobody is proposing to change the fundamental ethos of the NHS, which is that treatment is free at the point of need. The Labour party is conflating the two as a desperate political tactic.
John Pugh
The hon. Gentleman is not altogether wrong, but if we are to continue to deliver, in stressed circumstances, a service that is free at the point of need, we cannot run the NHS as an internal market for ever. In fact, the NHS is already trying to morph into something different. We now have health and wellbeing boards, which mean that commissioners and providers get together to try to agree a local plan. They are struggling in every way to behave like a health board, but they do not have the executive powers to do so. There has been the move away from tariffs, which have been used to try to adjust the market, and we are now talking about whole-treatment costs. There is also talk about integration.
What is clearly entirely disruptive, though, is the intrusion of competition where it is not needed—where it is simply dogma; where it is seen as a panacea for producing good results, whether or not there is a good case for saying that; where it derails sustainable services; or where it becomes a central operating principle of the NHS. None of those things is particularly helpful.
I do not want to comment on TTIP, because I do not think it is well understood at the moment, but we will certainly need to look at how it plays into the competition agenda.
John Healey
If the hon. Gentleman or any other Members want to know a little bit more about TTIP, particularly the potential impact on the NHS and public services, we have a meeting of the all-party group on European Union-United States trade and investment at 2 o’clock on Monday, at which the EU chief negotiator will be on the panel alongside Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison. The hon. Gentleman might like to come along.
John Pugh
If the right hon. Gentleman reminds me, I will endeavour to do so. What I am really hoping for, though, is a change in the conversation about the NHS so that we stop talking about the internal market—Labour Front Benchers have in a sense reneged on their involvement in that—and instead talk about how we should organise NHS services that will efficiently deliver the moral entitlements that people expect.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and to the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) for introducing this opportune Bill.
Does my hon. Friend agree that one problem with an internal market is the sheer complexity of tendering, which means that smaller organisations such as some in my constituency are simply not capable of matching up with the organisations that decide to tender for some of the contracts that are available?
John Pugh
My hon. Friend makes a good point. For those who are unsure about the benefits of the internal market, there is a way of addressing the problem, which is to allow individual health economies, in whatever area—Eltham or wherever—to opt out of the internal market if they can prove that there is a case for doing so. That could be put into legislation in a permissive form, so it would not be a top-down reorganisation, and it would allow people objectively and sensibly to test the benefits of the internal market against a more normal model of public service delivery, which I support, as I hope the hon. Member for Eltham does.
Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)
It is a pleasure to speak on this Bill.
Mark Reckless
And indeed on this side of the House.
It is a particular pleasure to speak on a Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), because I have spent time in the past few weeks defending myself following allegations from the Conservative party that I grew up in his constituency, in SE9.
Mark Reckless
Indeed, I am proud, and many people in my constituency have moved down from Eltham and the surrounding areas, and I am delighted that they returned me to the House in the early hours of this morning.
I found the hon. Gentleman’s speech compelling. At half-past 4 this morning or thereabouts, I was extolling the virtues of the Levellers and the Chartists. I can only think that I had a premonition of the speech that the hon. Gentleman was to make in the House this morning.
The other reason for my presence here is that, in the by-election I have just fought, we had in Naushabah Khan a Labour candidate who made—quite eloquently, I thought —the case against fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS, and she and others in Medway Labour commended the Bill to me.
Grahame M. Morris
I was not in Rochester last night. I joined a vigil outside Parliament by groups who are campaigning to save our NHS, and I had a conversation with a consultant oncologist on that very issue of fragmentation. He said that the only competition we should have in the NHS is the competition to defeat disease. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with that?
Mark Reckless
That sounds a good statement. I myself feel a certain degree of scepticism, as the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) said, about internal markets in the NHS and other public services. Much depends on the circumstances of the service provided, and an ideological predisposition either against or in favour of internal markets is probably not wise.
The Labour candidate in the by-election opposed fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS, and the Bill appears to do so as well. I have discovered that this is now the Labour party’s position. I had assumed that the Labour party was in favour of fragmentation and privatisation in the NHS, because that was my understanding of what the record had been.
Andy McDonald
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to clarify, for the benefit of the House, whether his party is in favour of a private insurance-backed approach to health care or whether it actually believes in the NHS.
Mark Reckless
My party believes in the NHS as a service that is free at the point of delivery. My father is a doctor, and my mother is a nurse. That belief is core to my values, and to the values of my party. [Interruption.] That is our policy. Our policy is determined by our party, and it is to support an NHS that is free at the point of delivery.
Mark Reckless
I think that the hon. Gentleman may be referring to the answer to a question that was asked two years ago, which is now being taken out of context. Our party is not quite like the Liberal Democrats with their federal policy executive, but we have formal measures for the making of policy, and UKIP has decided—
Dr Huppert
Although I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman on many things, I welcome him back to the House. He has talked about the history and the evidence. He might be interested to know that, according to the House of Commons Library, the amount spent by NHS England on buying health care from outside the NHS rose from £1.1 billion in 1997-98 to £7.5 billion in 2009-10. Those are the facts, according to the Library.
Mark Reckless
The hon. Gentleman is correct. There was a great deal of privatisation and, indeed, fragmentation of the NHS under Labour, and I do not deny that there has been more of it under the current Government. I think that it is a problem that has afflicted both main parties.
Mark Reckless
I will continue for a bit, if I may.
Let me explain how I view the issue from a local perspective. As far as I can see, Darent Valley hospital, which is near my constituency, was privatised under Labour in one of the most disastrous private finance initiatives experienced by the NHS. Medway NHS Foundation Trust became a foundation trust on the basis of what was largely a box-ticking exercise, which focused on finances and appeared to ignore the fact that by that stage the hospital’s standardised mortality rate was some 10% above the norm: one in 10 more patients were dying that should have been expected.
Mr Donohoe
I know that the hon. Gentleman had a late night, but can he tell us what is his party’s view of the health service in Scotland?
Mark Reckless
I will clarify the view of my party on the NHS in general, but I am afraid that I am not yet in a position to give details of its policy on the NHS in Scotland. I should be happy to seek to assist the hon. Gentleman on another occasion.
What happened in Medway was fragmentation. The hospital was cut loose by the Department of Health, and is now essentially run by an independent board. When there are problems and it is in special measures, there is now a potential for greater intervention, but we have in Monitor what appears to be a backstop regulator, rather than a regulator that is able to come in and run the hospital and turn it around. It can get rid of the chair and the chief executive, but it cannot make constructive improvements.
Mark Reckless
I will continue, if I may.
The independence of such hospitals, the inability of the House or the Secretary of State to drive improvements, and the decision to allow a hospital to become a foundation trust although one in 10 more people were dying than should have been the case, constitute an indictment of the last Government’s policy. I was delighted to hear from the Labour candidate whom I have faced in recent weeks that Labour is now against fragmentation and privatisation of the NHS. I welcome the Bill, and I am pleased to be able to support it.
Clive Efford
I welcome support for my Bill from all quarters, but why should anyone believe what the hon. Gentleman says about the NHS? Does he accept that the Government were elected with no mandate to introduce the 2012 Act, and that he voted for it?
Mark Reckless
I think that that is probably correct. I may be guilty of having believed the undertakings I was given by those on the Government Front Bench.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)
It might be helpful for the hon. Gentleman to bear in mind the words of his colleague, the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell), who said:
“Never one to slavishly support the party line, I would be quite prepared to oppose these reforms”—
the 2012 Act—
“if I felt they were a step back. But I won’t. These changes are necessary—and contrary to much of the mainstream media coverage, in my experience they are quietly supported by many doctors too.”
Does the hon. Gentleman support what his colleague said, or does he not?
Mark Reckless
I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell) was right in saying that some doctors supported the Bill that became the 2012 Act. During the early stages of that Bill, a number of representative bodies supported it, or were presented as doing so. As the Bill proceeded, however, some of what had been claimed to be support from organisations such as the British Medical Association seemed to fall away. I believe that the Bill ran to 460 pages.
The problem was the way in which legislation is made in the House. The coalition agreement promised us a House business committee, but no such committee deals with the allocation of time for legislation. We have a Committee of Selection, but it is run by the usual channels—the Whips on either side of the House—and people with expertise such as the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who might actually have improved the Bill, were excluded from it.
Dr Poulter
I feel I should quote further from what was said by the hon. Member for Clacton, when much of the Committee stage of the Health and Social Care Bill had been completed. He went on to say—on 11 February 2012, on his TalkCarswell.com website—
“If these proposals were defeated, it would be a setback for all those of us who would like to see public service reform. We need to keep our nerve.”
That rather contradicts what the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) has just said, does it not?
Mark Reckless
That is an excellent website, which I recommend to all Members. The Minister has said that my hon. Friend made those observations when most of the Committee stage of the Bill had been completed. Was that during the “pause” that had been invented as a new mechanism for Parliament? My hon. Friend is not here at the moment, but I think he would agree with me that the 2012 Act is not as it was billed to us by those on the Government Front Bench. It has led to an extraordinary degree of additional complexity in the NHS, and the introduction of competition bodies—and, in particular, European competition law—into the NHS is not welcome.
Mark Reckless
No, I will continue for a bit, if I may.
I do not think that the extent of the difficulties that doctors and others would encounter as a result of section 75 of the Act and the bureaucratic, market-based—or quasi-market-based—commissioning rules that it requires was any more apparent to my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton than it was to other Members, although some Opposition Members may have had premonitions of it. I thought that the Bill was intended to allow the various local bodies to get on with running the NHS in their areas. Some would run it better than others; there would be local decision-making and discretion, and people would learn from each other. Now, however, there are centrally determined rules that force everyone into, in particular, commissioning or contracting behaviour, but do not make sense in the context of the service that is being delivered.
Philip Davies
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his victory in last night’s by-election. It was an excellent result for him and it would be churlish not to point that out. I know that he is a long-standing believer in localism. Is he not worried by the British Medical Association’s concerns that the Bill would give much wider powers to the Secretary of State, thereby centralising powers and taking the day-to-day running of the NHS away from clinical staff and putting it in the Secretary of State’s hands? As a champion of localism, is he not worried by that?
Mark Reckless
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his congratulations; that is very decent of him. I am not a fan of quasi-autonomous bodies, of great amounts of regulators or of overlapping layers of bureaucracy; they rarely work. Given the degree of complexity that has now been brought into the NHS, I think it is possible—although I am not certain—that the centralisation of power in a single Secretary of State who is at least accountable to the House might be better than the current diffusion and fragmentation of powers, which does not seem to be working effectively. My party would like to replace the alphabet soup of regulators and the overlapping layers of bureaucracy with a single, elected health board for each county area. That would give a degree of clarity to the oversight and management of the NHS.
Mr Donohoe
Why does the hon. Gentleman not think that health boards should be taken back into local authority control, where a democratic ticket is already involved, rather than creating a separate vote for stand-alone health boards?
Mark Reckless
There is an argument for doing that, and a judgment has to be made. It might be possible, depending on the different areas of the countries—particularly in the devolved Administrations—that the solution to that question might be different. My general view is that it is much better to have democratic accountability than not to have it, and in many areas I would prefer that to be local. My party wants to see health boards elected on a county basis.
My party also wants European competition law to be taken out of the NHS, and the Bill is exemplary in that regard. I strongly support that provision.
I have signed a pledge on TTIP, along with most other candidates in the by-election, except for the Conservative—[Interruption.] No, not the Liberal one—that was not a good one to sign—although I did vote against tuition fees, along with most Opposition Members. I would like to see the NHS excluded from TTIP. There are arguments as to whether it will be or not, but those arguments should be settled in the House as per this Bill, rather than being left to the unpredictability of future legal actions.
Mark Reckless
I am just reaching my conclusion, if I may.
The hon. Member for Eltham made a mistake in talking about the UK negotiating on TTIP. That is an area of exclusive competence for the European Community, and it is therefore the EU Commission that will negotiate with the United States on that matter. When I first heard about TTIP, it sounded as though it would be all about free trade and I thought that it would be broadly a good thing. The more I looked into it, however, the more it seemed to be not about free trade but about the creation of a single set of transnational regulations between the US and the European Union, and that it would be illegal for anyone not complying with them to sell goods and services. I am therefore very sceptical about TTIP and I am not sure it is something that I would want to support. I certainly do not want to see the NHS included in it.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham on his Bill, and I look forward to supporting him in the Lobby.
David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)
I am grateful to be called to speak in the debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I apologise to my Front-Bench colleagues that I might not be here for the wind-ups because I have to be in Hinckley for the switching on of the Christmas lights, which is something I always look forward to.
I should like to follow a long tradition in the House in which the speaker who follows a Member making their maiden speech—even though I am told that, technically, it was not one—says something nice about them. I congratulate the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) on winning his by-election last night, and I further congratulate him on getting to the House this morning. I imagine that he has been up all night. I simply offer him this warning. I was thinking of Dave Nellist, a former Member for Coventry, who defected to another party and then disappeared. I have to warn the hon. Gentleman—my former hon. Friend—that the history of those who defect in this place shows that they do not remain here for very long after they come back. We expect to regain his seat at the next general election, but well done to him in the meantime.
I should also like to congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on introducing his Bill. I once had the honour to stand for the Greater London council in the constituency adjacent to his. It was then known as Woolwich East, so I know his area and his hospitals a little. He has certainly done well to get his Bill to the House, and I note from the Division this morning that he has 100 additional Members here today, so he is no doubt hoping for a closure motion at some point. If his Bill progresses, I would be happy to serve on its Committee. I have a long-standing interest in health matters and I have been a member of the Health Select Committee since it was set up in this Parliament, as well as of the Science and Technology Committee in this Parliament. I am also the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on integrated health care.
This is a wide-ranging Bill. I hope to address some of the things that are not in it, although I will not talk about all the things that are in it as time is short and I do not want to occupy the stage for too long. I want to look at three areas. The first is the hon. Gentleman’s proposal to change the arrangements that allow trusts to generate half their income from private sources. Secondly, I want to look at whether mergers should be dealt with by Monitor or whether that area should be reclaimed. I want to focus on mergers and integration, because the integration of services in the NHS is of fundamental importance. He might be able to improve his Bill in that respect. Thirdly, if time allows, I want to talk about the proposal to exempt the NHS from the transatlantic trade and investment partnership.
I have been listening to the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), and I believe that Labour’s whole strategy is based on something that is fundamentally untrue. It is based on trying to persuade the electorate that we are setting out to privatise the health service and thereby reduce the health care available. It is regrettable that Labour is taking the Goebbels-esque approach of saying something that is fundamentally untrue and then repeating it and repeating it in the hope that the electorate will buy into it. I put it to Labour Members that that might be a populist approach, but it could be hard for them to defend as we get nearer the election.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman says that he does not believe creeping privatisation is taking place as a result of the changes that the Government have introduced, but does he not see it as an inevitable consequence, even if it is not the Government’s stated intention?
David Tredinnick
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The Government have made it possible for trusts to generate half their income from private sources, but it is not true to make out that we are in some way privatising the health service in a way that is detrimental to patients. We have made it possible for trusts to generate more income. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if we could pay for all health care through general taxation. However, the Health Committee has examined the Nicholson challenge and seen the tremendous demand on resources. We have managed to maintain a flat-line budget in this Parliament, but demand is such that it is difficult to pay for everything through general taxation. One way to do it is by getting the private sector to contribute to the health service. The original arrangements were increased to this figure of nearly half. The thing to remember is that all the money generated from these sources is reinvested in patient care.
I had some freedom of information requests made, and wish to refer to the effect of these arrangements on four NHS foundation trusts in the midlands. They are not from Leicestershire, because those figures did not come through, but I do represent a midlands constituency. The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust received £68,000 in 2010-11, £50,000 in 2011-12 and another £80,000 in 2012-13 in funds that can go directly into patient care. The figures for the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust are £559,000 in 2009-10, another half a million in 2010-11, a bit more in 2011-12 and nearly £532,000 in 2012-13, and there has been an increase to £628,000 in 2013-14.
My FOI request to the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust elicited the following response—it is a short paragraph, so if I may, I will read it out:
“The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust gains substantial income from Apley Ward and Clinic. Where private patient work is carried out in an NHS hospital, it is carried out in addition to and not in place of regular NHS treatment. Profits from this private facility make a considerable contribution to the running costs of the hospital for the benefit of all patients and staff.”
The hon. Member for Eltham made a passionate speech, but this point goes to the heart of the issue: privatisation is not about reducing resources, but increasing them. I gave notice to the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) that I was going to mention the other figures I received, which are from the Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust and which show that over the past four years it has gained between £14,000 and £50,000 a year. The figures illustrate clearly that this approach is helping, and that is very welcome.
Mr Nuttall
The point my hon. Friend has just made is key in showing the dangers of this Bill. People have been writing to say that they are concerned about the risk of privatisation, but what is actually happening as a result of the 2012 Act process is that there is more money in our NHS, rather than less.
David Tredinnick
The Act is complicated. It is a big Act and it landed with a thump when the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) dropped it on the Opposition Benches. I think he did so intentionally; and it was very theatrical and effective. It is true that there is more money there, and it is clear that the Government pledged at the last election to maintain the funding of the health service and have done so. We also have in place the Nicholson challenge, a phrase coined by my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell)—formerly the Member for Loughborough—when he was Chair of the Health Committee, and we now face even greater challenges.
Let me set out to the hon. Member for Eltham what he could include in his Bill if it goes forward. He could examine the next stage of bringing together health and social care. On Tuesday, the Health Committee heard from Dame Kate Barker, the chair of the Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England. We were examining the transitional costs of bringing health and social care together, and looking ahead at the savings that can be made. The hon. Gentleman might apply his mind to the complications arising from the different streams of funding represented in health and social care, whereby health is funded by general taxation and some private support, which I have already discussed, whereas social care is the subject of means tests and other constraints. We are therefore talking about completely different funding stream. I do not know how the Health Committee will report this, but I was struck by Dame Kate Barker’s determination that there should be one person running health and social care. That is essential if we are going to bring those two things together.
The other point the hon. Gentleman should take on board as we look at the Bill is the high profile that the Secretary of State and his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), have given to patient choice. The Government have said time and again that patient choice is at the heart of the health service, and we have already seen the benefits. The personal budgets now available for people who are seriously ill have had three benefits. First, they enable the patient to choose whatever treatment they want, be it tai chi, yoga or piano therapy—I believe that there have even been cases where tickets to a football match have been given. This is not something regulated by double-blind placebo controlled trials, as some of the other access arrangements for health care are. Secondly, the personal budgets enable the carers to go out into the world and get jobs, so freeing them up. Thirdly, when the personal budget money is given, it is spent responsibly by the patients. We have a whole new paradigm of health through personal budgets, and that should be examined through this Bill.
I have always felt that the 2012 Act and the reforms that were made produced something that put in place two legs on the stool, not three. The third leg comprises the vast and diverse multiplicity of support services that are not used in great depth in the health service now. Using them would considerably reduce costs and increase choice. The choice of these other support services will inevitably come to the fore as patients demand what they want, and we really have to bring this into the health service.
I have had many conversations about these things with the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter)—the Minister on the Front-Bench today. He has entrusted me with being vice-chair of the herbal working group, which is trying to sort out herbal medicine regulation. When we examine the support services that are not now part of mainstream health care, we see that we have a fundamental problem relating to the insistence that we rely on evidence-based medicine. I do not know where that phrase came from—it has not been around for a long time. Various bodies protect the public, and all new drugs are carefully scrutinised, by the pharmacists and the Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee, which has put together a list of what are, in effect, poisons and bans the use of some herbs. The public are protected in that way, but it is very difficult to use normal measurements to assess the effectiveness of, for example, acupuncture, which the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has approved for treating lower back pain. A lot of evidence shows that acupuncture can reduce the effects of lower back pain and save the NHS a lot of cost. With homeopathic medicine, which I have long supported and advocated, it is impossible to run trials on every dilution: some are so dilute that they do not show up.
David Tredinnick
I am always glad to give way to the hon. Gentleman—I am sure he will agree with my every word.
Dr Huppert
My hon. Friend will be well aware that there have been many trials of homeopathic medicines, and the fact is that none of them has shown that they work better than a placebo. He is right that they are very dilute; that is why they do not work.
David Tredinnick
The hon. Gentleman makes my point. I remember when some of his friends went to Boots in Kensington high street and consumed the entire stock of homeopathic medicine. They saw that as a huge triumph, as they felt it illustrated the fact that homeopathic medicine was not effective. Of course it did nothing of the sort; it proved that it was absolutely safe to take these preparations under any circumstances, and that the only time they work is if they are in the right preparation and are taken in the right amount, as prescribed by a professional.
I say to the Minister—I hope he will tune in to what I am saying—that we must move away from this insistence on evidence-based medicine and look at evidence-based practitioners. This is an area that has been overlooked for a very long time. There is much evidence that practitioners are well regulated, and we do not need to insist on checking every single preparation that people consume. Five areas of regulation already exist. The hon. Member for Eltham might want to think about that, as it is a matter that could be put into the Bill if it goes to Committee.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is aware that I am watching very carefully the matters that he is addressing in the House right now. He must speak to the Bill. We are discussing whether the Bill should have a Second Reading and go into Committee.
David Tredinnick
Madam Deputy Speaker, you are kind to draw that to my attention. I simply say this: there are different regulatory bodies—not just Monitor—that we should consider. We should be taking on board the fact that osteopaths, chiropractors and homeopathic doctors are regulated by separate Acts of Parliament, yet the Health and Care Professions Council regulates clinical scientists, paramedics, physiotherapists. The Professional Standards Authority, which is another regulatory body, provides oversight of nine statutory bodies. Then there is the umbrella body, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council. I will leave it at that, as I do not wish to stray. On the safety aspects of those bodies, I understand from Balens, which has been insuring support services for 10 years, that there has not been a claim against a herbalist for more than 10 years.
The Bill partly addresses the issue of the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. Across the world, there is a whole mass of new thinking that could be incorporated in our health service. I am nervous that if we take out TTIP—if an exemption for the NHS is proposed—it will not be in our interests. In America there are a lot of integrated practices, in which a range of different health disciplines are brought together to reduce costs.
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government and the European Commission have made it clear that decisions on the provision of public services will continue to be made by the Government here in Westminster?
David Tredinnick
We are agreed on that. It is a case of the extent to which we derogate the powers of the Secretary of State. We have a whole lot of new bodies, including clinical commissioning groups, which have been a great success.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham on securing this slot today. I wonder whether he still has 100 troops in the Tea Room waiting to come in for a closure motion, if Madam Deputy Speaker is gracious enough to grant it. I am happy to serve with him in the future on his Bill.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
Tuesday 20 March 2012 was a black day for the NHS and for this Parliament. A Bill with no mandate from the British people was allowed to pass through this House and to place market forces at the heart of our health service. It allowed this democratic House to be bypassed when it comes to decisions affecting the country’s most valued institution. In other words, it was a crime against democracy and the national health service. Ever since that dark day, the damage has been mounting: NHS services worth billions of pounds—including blue light 999 ambulance services and cancer services—forced out to open tender; millions of pounds thrown at competition lawyers and consultants to run those tenders; and NHS hospitals, freed to earn up to 49% of their income from treating private patients, doing just that and letting NHS waiting lists get longer.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Is my right hon. Friend aware of the unique deal between Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust and the Labour-led Northumberland county council in which the council bought out the PFI deal, which means a better deal for the taxpayers in Northumberland and a much better deal for the NHS trust and the patients?
Andy Burnham
Yes, I am aware of the deal, and it is a great example of how a Labour council, working with the NHS, can take steps to improve funding for front-line patient care. It happened because of the deal that was struck in the latter stages of the previous Labour Government.
As a result of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, NHS hospitals can earn more money from treating private patients, while NHS waiting lists get longer. Those same hospitals have now been told by competition authorities that they cannot collaborate any more because it is “anti-competitive.” How did it come to this? That is not the health service that we have known for 66 years. Every day that this illegitimate legislation remains in force is a day closer to the demise of the national health service.
Jonathan Edwards
In response to an FOI request, I was told by my local health board that between December last year and July this year, 373 ophthalmology patients, 90 pain management patients, 165 neurology patients and 264 orthopaedic patients were transferred to private sector providers at a cost of nearly £600,000. What is the right hon. Gentleman’s message to his Labour colleague, the Health Minister for Wales?
Andy Burnham
I will give the hon. Gentleman my message now: the Labour Government in England and in Wales have taken steps to bring down NHS waiting lists. When we left office, they were at the lowest ever level. I make no apology to him for those improvements.
The 2012 Act has put the NHS in danger, which is why it has to go. Back on that March day in 2012, I pledged that the party that created the NHS would repeal that Bill at the first opportunity, and today we honour that promise. The Bill before us, presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), restores the right values at the heart of the NHS: collaboration over competition; integration over fragmentation; people before profits.
Angie Bray
Will the right hon. Gentleman care to comment on the letter in The Daily Telegraph today, signed by a number of doctors and led by the chairman of NHS Alliance, asking people not to support this Bill, as it would be a backward step for patients?
Andy Burnham
I am sure that Tory central office has been ringing around for a few days trying to find some doctors who are still in favour of the 2012 legislation, and they found 11. Well, I think that is probably about the limit for the number of people prepared to put their name to it. I can tell the hon. Lady that thousands of doctors lined up with the Opposition and pleaded with her party to call off its reorganisation, and that included the British Medical Association and the royal colleges, but it would not listen. The Government ploughed on regardless, and the NHS has gone downhill ever since.
That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham gave a stirring speech of the kind this House needs to hear more, full of conviction and passion, standing up for the national health service that he believes in. He has brought before the House a Bill that reaffirms the words of Nye Bevan’s original National Health Service Act 1946 on the democratic accountability of the NHS to the Secretary of State and, by extension, to this House. The Bill abolishes the compulsory tendering of NHS services and removes market forces. It reduces the private patient income cap back down to single figures. Once and for all, it fully exempts the NHS from EU procurement and competition law, as is our right under the Lisbon treaty. It sends the Government an uncompromising message that the NHS will never be touched by any TTIP treaty.
In particular, I commend my hon. Friend for saying that it is about time this House regained full sovereignty over the national health service. They gave it away—the Eurosceptics sitting there on the Government Back Benches—when they mandated open tendering of services. By doing that, they placed the NHS in the full glare of European competition law. [Interruption.] They do not like to hear it, but that is what they did.
Sir Oliver Heald
Is the right hon. Gentleman the same man who used to talk about an end to the polarising debate on private and public sector provision? Is he the same man who, when Secretary of State, privatised the services for an entire hospital at Hinchingbrooke? What is he doing today? It is buff and blow party politics.
Andy Burnham
I told the hon. and learned Gentleman earlier that that was incorrect and that he should withdraw the suggestion, because I did not do that. The contract for Hinchingbrooke was awarded under his Government. I will tell him who this man is. This is the man who, when Secretary of State, introduced the concept of NHS preferred provider, because I believe in the public NHS and what it represents, unlike him. I believe in an NHS that puts people before profit, unlike him. That is the man he is talking to, and that is what I will always stand up for.
Dr Huppert
The right hon. Gentleman correctly says that the contract for Hinchingbrooke was let under this Government, but does he not accept that it was he who, when Health Secretary, reduced the list of bidders to five, none of which were NHS bidders, and then to three, all of which were private companies? Does he accept that he could have left NHS bidders in the process, rather than only private bidders? Then he complains when one of the providers that he shortlisted got the contract.
Andy Burnham
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has to get his facts right, because they are wrong. When I was Health Secretary and Hinchingbrooke needed to find a new operator, I asked local NHS trusts in his area to come forward, and at the time none of them wanted to do that, so we had to find an operator—
Sir Oliver Heald
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I may have inadvertently said that the contract was let, but I do not believe that I did. The true position is that it was the right hon. Gentleman who took the decision to privatise the services in that hospital, and it is wrong for him to seek to deny it. [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. I appreciate that the hon. and learned Gentleman wishes to ensure that the record is set straight. He has attempted so to do, but it is not a point of order for me to deal with.
Andy Burnham
“Attempted” is the operative word, Madam Deputy Speaker. The hon. and learned Gentleman says that it was my decision, but it was the decision of his right hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley). He did it when their Government came in, and the hon. and learned Gentleman should have the good grace to withdraw what he said.
I was in the middle of answering the intervention from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—the hon. and learned Gentleman should listen to this, because he will get his answer. I said that the process should go forward under the NHS preferred provider principle, which I introduced—he seems not to understand that. To correct him, when the previous Government left office there were three bidders, one of which was an NHS provider, so he really needs to get his facts straight—
Andy Burnham
No. The hon. Gentleman needs to get his facts straight before he tries to shout the odds in my direction.
The Bill gives back to this House sovereignty over the national health service, which millions of people will welcome. The Bill means so much to so many people who are concerned about what is happening to the NHS right now under this Government.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend says that the Bill will mean so much to so many people. He will recall that in 1997 the waiting lists at Northwick Park hospital were the highest in the country, with people having to wait for 21 hours on trolleys. He will also know that the people in Brent and Harrow who rely on that hospital today are now enduring the highest waiting lists in the country again. Waiting lists came down on his watch, but they are back up again. What message does that send to the people of Brent and Harrow?
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend is right to remind the House that in 1997 people were spending years on NHS waiting lists, and even dying while still on them. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) said, we brought those waiting lists down, and by the time we left government in 2010 this country had the lowest ever NHS waiting lists and the highest ever level of public satisfaction in the NHS. That is Labour’s record, and we will not let the Government forget it.
What is happening now? NHS waiting lists are back at a six-year high. That is the result of the reorganisation that the Government ploughed through, which nobody wanted. The country did not want it. There are millions of people out there who are concerned about what the Government are doing. It will not have escaped their notice that scores of Government MPs have failed to turn up today to defend what was one of their flagship Bills. What a shower! There are people who kept a vigil outside the House last night, in cold temperatures, imploring Members to be here to pass this Bill because the issues it raises matter so much to them. Then we have the spineless MPs of a disintegrating Government, some loaded up to the eyeballs with links to private health care, who do not have the guts to come here today to argue for what they have done. Is it any wonder that people are losing faith in this place?
Dr Huppert
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The right hon. Gentleman claimed earlier that one of the bidders at Hinchingbrooke was an NHS provider, but according to the National Audit Office there was Circle, Serco and Ramsay. Can he now either correct the record for the House, or let us know which of those three he believes is an NHS provider?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly good point of debate, but it is not a point of order.
Andy Burnham
We have spineless Government MPs who will not come here today to argue for the Act.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) on his victory and on being here today, despite being up all night—I cannot imagine that he managed to get any sleep. His party leader has said that when the hon. Gentleman is tired he says things that he does not mean—I think that he just nodded there. Given that he has been up all night, I can only conclude that he does not actually believe what he said in the speech we just heard. In three days he has gone from being in favour of the repatriation of European citizens to being against the privatisation of the NHS. That is a pretty big political distance to cover in just three days.
Mark Reckless
I have only ever argued for European citizens to be able to stay; any other words came from others, not me. It is the right hon. Gentleman’s party that has reversed its position, having previously privatised the Darent Valley hospital and fragmented the Medway Foundation Trust, but it now seems to have a better policy, which I am happy to support.
Andy Burnham
The hon. Gentleman said that he could not understand Labour’s position, but surely he remembers 2012, when Opposition Members spoke with force against that legislation, which he then voted for in the Lobby. I know that it has been a long night, but he really should try to remember these things, because they are quite important.
Mr Anderson
Is it not also true that the hon. Gentleman went through the Lobby not once, but 18 times, despite being told time and again that what has now happened would happen? The people who had their finger on the pulse were telling us what would happen, but he ignored them.
Andy Burnham
It is a tiring business being an MP and it is possible to forget things, particularly when one drinks as many pints as UKIP Members do, but they should try to remember. Their party leader once said that he would give the NHS budget to insurance companies; apparently, he does not believe that now. The deputy leader, a Mr Nuttall, said that the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire was to be congratulated on bringing a whiff—just a whiff—of privatisation to the NHS, and the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell), whom the Minister quoted earlier, described the Lansley reforms as “fairly modest”. He chided his Tory colleagues who were sniping against him at the time and said that the reforms must not be derailed. The party says it is anti-politics in the way things are done. This is sheer opportunism and dishonesty.
Mark Reckless
I recall much of what the right hon. Gentleman said from the Dispatch Box in 2012, and I would like to credit him because a lot of it has come to pass. He was perspicacious in much of what he said and many of the assurances that I was given from the Government Front Bench have been found wanting.
Andy Burnham
I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says—it would be churlish for me to say otherwise—and I am grateful for the way he said it. The things Opposition Members were saying back then have happened, and we can see the effects of the Government’s reorganisation in the NHS. With the new figures that came out this morning, we see that A and E has missed the Government’s target for 70 weeks in a row. The A and E figures are the barometer of the health and care system. They are the best place to look if we want to see whether there are problems in the health and care system. The fact that the target has been missed for 70 weeks in a row tells us that severe storms are building over the NHS.
Mr Jim Cunningham
I am glad my right hon. Friend raised that. It takes us back to pre-1997, when people who could not get beds were lying on trolleys. I am sure he remembers that. I can remember a hospital in Coventry that was falling down. As a result of the Labour Government, we got a new hospital.
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend is right. The Labour Government inherited a situation where almost three quarters of the NHS estate was built before 1948. We transformed that, as well as bringing those waiting lists down. He is right to remind us.
I cannot believe that Government Members have not had the guts to be here today to argue for their own policy on the NHS. Or is it that under the shambolic regime of their new Chief Whip, who is now inflicting the same chaos on the parliamentary Conservative party as he did on England’s schools, the Government did not think they could win the vote today, so they did not dare to bring their troops here to hold it? I do not know what the reason is, but they clearly do not believe in their own legislation and the catastrophic reorganisation that followed. An unnamed senior Cabinet Minister has been quoted in The Times as admitting that it was their single biggest mistake.
Mr Ronnie Campbell
Will my right hon. Friend touch on the fact that 71 coalition Members of Parliament are being paid by private companies involved with the national health service?
Andy Burnham
It is one of the biggest scandals of recent times that people in this House who have links to private health, and many more in the other place, put through legislation that did not have a mandate from the British people and from which they would benefit financially. The story of that will one day be told in full.
The reorganisation has dragged the NHS down and left it on the brink. A reorganisation that was meant to put GPs at the heart of the NHS has left patients waiting days or even weeks to get a GP appointment. This week, there was news that the NHS has missed its cancer standard for the third quarter, leaving thousands of cancer patients waiting more than two months for treatment to start. It is a reorganisation that has systematically run down the NHS and opened the door for it to be sold off.
Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
The reorganisation was unnecessary. My right hon. Friend is no doubt aware that in Staffordshire a £1 billion cancer contract has been put out to tender. The newly rebuilt local hospital is concerned that that will destabilise its finances. Does he agree that we should be very careful about going down that route without proper consideration?
Andy Burnham
The example that my hon. Friend quotes is the best example of the fact that the Government see no limit at all on the scale or extent of privatisation in the NHS, both in terms of the monetary value— £1 billion—and the fact that they are prepared to put cancer services out on the open market.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
Does my right hon. Friend recall that some of us supported his opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill, which purported to be England-only legislation? By its marketisation and altering of the public service ethic for the health service, it was going to be predictive legislation with severe implications for devolved services. For similar reasons we support the Bill today, because it offers a bulwark against TTIP hazards for devolved health services.
Andy Burnham
The Bill before us deals comprehensively with that threat from any proposed TTIP treaty. I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman in his place today.
Robert Flello
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the companies on the list of preferred bidders to provide cancer care in north Staffordshire include CSC computer services, which was responsible for the £10 billion IT failure, the Lorenzo system, and Interserve Investments, which was fined £11 million by the Office of Fair Trading for anti-competitive bid rigging? These are the sort of firms that our cancer services might go to.
Andy Burnham
Those examples will alarm people. In Greater Manchester, a bus company has been running ambulance services. We had news this week that an arms manufacturer is bidding for a GP contract. These are the things that are beginning to happen to the NHS. Nobody’s constituents have ever given their permission for any of this to happen.
We heard speeches from the hon. Member for Bosworth (David Tredinnick) and the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who said that nothing had changed and what was happening in the NHS now was just a continuation of what the previous Government were doing. No, it is not. The right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire said in a speech on 9 July 2005:
“The time has come for pro-competitive reforms in…health”
and he help up the example of utilities and rail. That was the specific inspiration for his reorganisation. He sold his Bill on the basis that doctors would decide, but doctors tell us that they have no choice but to put services out to the market. Section 75 says that commissioners may not run a tender if there is only one available provider. That is never the case, which is why CCG lawyers conclude that they have no choice but to put services out to tender.
That is why we see, according to figures from the NHS Support Federation, that 865 contracts for NHS services, worth £18.3 billion, have been offered to the market. Some 67% of the contracts awarded so far have gone outside the NHS. It is this decision to mandate the tendering of services which places the NHS in the full glare of EU procurement and competition law. Because Ministers have refused to exempt the NHS from the TTIP treaty, we could soon have private US health care providers ringing up CCGs to challenge them on their commissioning decisions.
This Bill legislates to remove that threat. It repeals section 75 and it really does let doctors and local commissioners decide. It restores the role of the Secretary of State and brings much needed ministerial accountability back to this House. No longer will Ministers be told to write to NHS England when they have concerns. Instead, there will be answers from the Government Dispatch Box about the service that matters most to their constituents. It removes the role of the competition authorities that the Government’s Act introduced. It stops the ludicrous situation where hospitals such as Bournemouth and Poole are not allowed to collaborate. Importantly, it stops hospitals devoting half their beds and half their facilities to the treatment of private patients.
Mr Slaughter
Since Hammersmith and Central Middlesex A and E departments closed two months ago, we have had people waiting in ambulances and waiting rooms with every seat taken. We have even had people waiting on floors. The Government’s answer to that is to close two more A and E departments, those at Charing Cross and Ealing in west London. Is that not just preparing the NHS for failure and for privatisation?
Andy Burnham
What is happening in west London should send a shiver down the spine of every community in the country. The NHS is being torn apart, which is damaging patient care and leading to the consequences that my hon. Friend outlines.
This is how the character of the NHS is changing under this Government and before our eyes. With every year that the Health and Social Care Act stays on the statute book, the private sector will be more embedded in the NHS and the public NHS weakened as a result. The Government have undermined the “N” in NHS. They are letting our hospitals become part-privatised and they must be stopped. If the Government continue on their current course, in the next Parliament the NHS will be overwhelmed by a toxic mix of cuts and privatisation.
If the Government stop this Bill receiving Royal Assent, it will form the basis of the repeal Bill that the next Labour Government will lay before the House in May next year. But it will do more than that: it will remove the competition role to allow the full integration of health and care to build and lay the foundations for a 21st-century NHS.
One final thing needs to be said. Before we vote, there is a simple truth that all Members in all parts of the House must confront: nobody here has permission from their constituents to put the NHS up for sale. Today is their last chance to put that right before they face their constituents in six months’ time. The people of this country value and trust a public NHS that puts people before profits. This Bill restores that. The party that created the NHS is proud to support it, and I urge all Members to vote for it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)
I shall begin by returning to the founding moment of our NHS, when a national health service was created which remains to this day a world-class health service where care is available to all, irrespective of ability to pay and free for all at the point of delivery. These fundamental principles of our NHS have been cherished and protected by each and every Government throughout its proud history, and were in 2012, for the first time, put on to statutory footing by this Government through the Health and Social Care Act.
Dr Poulter
If my hon. Friend will bear with me, I am going to make a little more progress and then give way later on.
Those who believe that our NHS has always been run solely through public providers are of course very wrong. From its very inception, the NHS that Nye Bevan created has comprised providers in the public and the non-public sectors. In 1948, independent GPs, community pharmacists and dental practitioners contracted with our health service to provide primary medical services to patients, and they continue to do so to this day as part of the public-private partnership. It is worth reflecting on the fact that Tony Blair’s former political secretary, John McTiernan, said only this August that
“an NHS without private providers is unimaginable. For one thing, no one—even on Labour’s extreme left—is arguing that we should nationalise general practice. But GPs are private providers, acceptable to opponents of the ‘private sector’ because most encounters with the NHS are visits to your local doctor”.
We also take for granted the key role played by charities and the voluntary sector in providing NHS care to patients across the country, notably Macmillan Cancer Support and Marie Curie Cancer Care.
In opening my contribution to this debate, I reaffirm this Government’s commitment to the founding principles of our NHS, a health service free at the point of delivery, and recognise that since its creation by Nye Bevan in 1948 our NHS has always been a public-private partnership. For public services to be equitable and free at the point of use, they did not all need to be provided on a monopoly basis within the public sector, controlled in a rigid way by local bureaucracies often deeply resistant to innovation and genuine local autonomy.
“The aim should be to change fundamentally the way the NHS was run: to break up the monolith; to introduce a new relationship with the private sector; to import concepts of choice and competition”.
Those are not my words, but those of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair about the reforms to the NHS that he introduced under the previous Labour Government.
Angie Bray
Does my hon. Friend agree that the most damaging thing for the NHS—patients and staff alike—is a lot of misleading scaremongering? I am afraid that we have heard more of that in the Chamber today. Will he correct the record to make sure that it is very clear that the pledge made by the Secretary of State for Health that the A and Es at Ealing and Charing Cross hospitals will both remain open for the long term still stands, and that they will allow themselves to be directed by Bruce Keogh’s report such that whatever recommendations he makes on A and E, they will make sure that they meet those requirements?
Dr Poulter
I am happy to confirm and to put on the record the points that my hon. Friend has made. It is important that the NHS is not used as a political football, and that services are always designed and delivered in the right way for patients. There is often too much scaremongering in these debates. I reiterate that what she said about the local A and Es is absolutely correct.
Dr Poulter
I have just dealt with it, and I am going to make a little progress.
I want to deal with the contribution made by the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). He failed to address the issues that I had raised earlier about the support that the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell), his party colleague, gave to the Health and Social Bill—now the Health and Social Care Act. In fact, as the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) said, the hon. Member for Clacton thought that the reforms did not go far enough. Indeed, the leader of his party is on record as talking about the need, in effect, to privatise our NHS. I would like to reaffirm the commitment that that will absolutely never happen under this Government or any Conservative Government.
Another important point needs to be made. Earlier this week, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood expressed frankly unacceptable and distasteful views on repatriation. We must of course bear in mind that 40% of staff in our NHS come from very diverse, multicultural backgrounds. We very much value the contribution that doctors, nurses and health care staff from all over the world make to our NHS. I do not want to see those people repatriated; I want to see them continuing to deliver high-quality care for patients in our NHS—something that UKIP clearly opposes.
Mark Reckless
I have made absolutely no such remarks; I have said only that we wanted such people to be able to stay. The disgraceful remarks were actually made by the Conservative candidate, who juxtaposed the issues of unlimited immigration and fear of crime.
Dr Poulter
I think that the hon. Gentleman’s remarks are very clearly on the record, and I am sure that NHS staff, many of whom come from very diverse, multicultural backgrounds, will be very aware of them. In this Conservative-led Government, we are very proud of the contribution that people from all over the world make to our NHS, and I believe that that needs to continue in the future. As we have seen from the hon. Gentleman’s leader, his party makes it up as it goes along on things to do with the NHS. It is in favour of privatisation and does not value the contribution—[Interruption.]
Sir Tony Baldry
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. There is so much noise coming from the Opposition Bench below the Gangway that it is impossible even for someone who is as near to the Minister as me to hear what he is saying. Given that Labour Members appear to support this Bill, it would be a courtesy for them at least to listen to the Minister with some attention.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
The right hon. Gentleman knows very well that all Members exercise their right to speak loudly, quietly, in stage whispers and in other ways in this Chamber. I am listening very carefully to the level of noise, and if it reaches much higher than it already has, I will ask Members to be more courteous to the Minister. However, I am quite sure that the Members present will wish to be courteous to the Minister and to hear what he has to say.
Dr Poulter
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that Members in all parts of the House—although perhaps not the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood—would like to reaffirm their commitment to and the value they place on all NHS staff, no matter what background or culture they come from. We want those staff to continue to practise in and work for our NHS to the benefit of patients.
Dr Poulter
I think that the hon. Gentleman has said quite enough already, and I need to make some progress.
Let me move on to the second, substantive, point in this debate, on which I hope there will be a large amount of agreement. It was articulated—
Dr Poulter
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The point was articulated very well by my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) in one of the best and most accurate speeches of this Parliament in an NHS debate.
Mark Reckless
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Minister has made a false allegation to which he has not given me the right of reply. Of course I welcome all those immigrants in the NHS. They are very welcome and we want them to stay as much as he does.
Madam Deputy Speaker
There has been much discussion this morning about who has said what about what. My concern in the Chair is that the Bill should be discussed. That is the matter before the House, and we will discuss it.
Dr Poulter
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I think the tone of that point of order made my point for me better than I could have done.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury said in what was one of the best speeches on the NHS I have heard in this Parliament, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 did not introduce competition into our NHS. To say that it did is factually incorrect, scaremongering and distracts the NHS from addressing the key issues it faces. It was the creation of a mixed health economy, implemented by the previous Labour Government, that exposed our NHS to competition law, not the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act.
Andy Burnham
That is a very important point that goes to the heart of this debate and that really needs to be cleared up for those listening and watching. The Minister said that the Act did not introduce competition. Will he confirm that it gave, for the first time, a role to the competition authorities under the Enterprise Act 2002 and that since then they have intervened, for the first time ever in the history of the NHS, in Bournemouth and Poole?
Dr Poulter
What I will confirm is that it is factually correct, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury made clear, to say that it was the previous Labour Government—Tony Blair’s Government—who introduced competition into our NHS. At the end of Labour’s time in office, I believe that £6 billion a year was going to NHS providers. The right hon. Member for Leigh was quite happy to pay private sector providers 11% more than NHS providers for providing the same service. That was Labour’s commitment to the private sector, which we have cleared up and put right in the 2012 Act.
Let us remember what the Labour party said in its last general election manifesto. I am sure Labour Members will remember it well—the right hon. Gentleman may well have written it. It said:
“All hospitals will become Foundation Trusts…Foundation Trusts will be given the freedom to expand their provision…and community care, and to increase their private services”.
That is from the manifesto that every Labour Member stood on at the last election. The facts are clear: competition in our NHS was introduced well before this Parliament and well before this Government came into power. It was introduced by policies made by Members who now sit on the Opposition Benches—the policies of the previous Labour Government.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury reminded us, it was Labour that introduced the use of independent treatment centres in 2003, the “any willing provider” policy and the advent of patient choice in 2006, and it was Labour’s policies when in government that brought NHS commissioning under the scope of European competition law through the Public Contract Regulations 2006.
Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
There is an interesting argument taking place between the two Front Benchers about who is responsible for bringing competition into the health service, but the fact is that, no matter who is responsible, the health service could now come under the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. Why will the Government not specifically exclude health services from TTIP before it is negotiated?
Dr Poulter
I will come on to TTIP later, and I hope I will be able to reassure the hon. Gentleman.
The previous Labour Government attempted to make commissioners compliant with the law by publishing the “Principles and rules for cooperation and competition” in 2007 and establishing the competition and co-operation panel in 2009, to oversee Labour’s NHS marketplace. Let us be clear: it was the previous Labour Government who chose to introduce private providers into our NHS and it was the previous Labour Government who set up the legal framework to support private providers in the health service.
It has been said that
“the private sector puts its capacity into the NHS for the benefit of NHS patients, which I think most people in this country would celebrate.”—[Official Report, 15 May 2007; Vol. 460, c. 251WH.]
Once again, those are not my words, but those of the right hon. Member for Leigh when he was a Minister in the previous Government. That is a fitting memory of the previous Labour Government’s expansion of private providers in the NHS. Let us remind ourselves of the right hon. Gentleman’s words again: he said that most people in this country would celebrate the private sector in the NHS.
Mr Ronnie Campbell
The Minister talks about Labour privatisation, but why is it that so many Conservative Members are being paid by private companies? What are you getting money off them for? What are you doing?
Dr Poulter
I am just a doctor who still works in the health service and I practise medicine for free. Of course, we could go into the fact that I am the only Front Bencher present who has front-line experience of looking after patients. Professional politicians on the Opposition Benches are outlining a case that is incoherent with their record in government. We could also talk about the huge union funding that goes towards many Labour policies, but time would forbid us from doing so and I am sure that the Deputy Speaker would not want me to digress from the subject of this debate.
Let us come on to what the Health and Social Care Act actually did. First, it stripped out an entire layer of management from what was at the time an overly bureaucratic NHS. This is an important point that hon. Members would do well to listen to. The reforms will save our NHS £5.5 billion in this Parliament alone, and £1.5 billion every following year. That money is being put back into front-line patient care. In addition, as I notified the House in an answer to a recent written question, spending on administration as a proportion of the total NHS budget has fallen under this Government from 4.3% in 2010-11 to 2.9% in 2013. More money is going into front-line patient care because we have stripped out bureaucracy and administration and freed up that money to look after patients.
Between 2010 and July 2014, the number of infrastructure and administration support staff in the NHS has reduced by 10.3%, which is about 21,000. That includes a 17.7% decrease in managers and senior managers combined. Savings from reducing bureaucracy in this manner are being ploughed back into front-line patient care. For instance, we now employ 8,000 more doctors and 5,600 more nurses on our wards than in May 2010, and our NHS can do nearly 1 million more operations every year.
Clive Efford
The hon. Gentleman is taking us through a very detailed list of bureaucratic costs. Obviously, the Government are paying close attention to that, but why is it that when I asked them about the cost of overseeing the tendering process—the cost of lawyers, accountants and other advisers—they said that they do not collect that information?
Dr Poulter
I will come on later to the costs that the hon. Gentleman’s Bill would directly create. The point is that we should be proud—the Labour party should be supporting the Government—that we are reducing administration and bureaucratic costs, because that money is now being spent on patients. Why cannot Labour for once accept that a good thing has happened and that more money is now going into front-line patient care?
The second effect of the 2012 Act is that it empowered local doctors and nurses, as those closest to and most able to determine the needs of their patients, to design and lead the delivery of services around the needs of those patients. Thirdly, the Act placed great importance on and sought to drive increased integration across our NHS, a point clearly articulated by my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (David Tredinnick). Commissioners had duties placed on them by the Act to consider how services could be provided in a more integrated way, and we have since built on the Act by supporting a number of integration pioneer sites, which will trail-blaze new ideas to bring care closer together, particularly for frail elderly people and people with complex care needs. They will be leaders of change—a change we have to see in the health system, if we want to offer the very best quality of care to patients.
We are also supporting the health and care system through the £5.3 billion better care fund, with commissioners working in partnership with local authorities to deliver more integrated person-centred care. Offering seven-day services and delivering care that is centred on patients’ needs will encourage organisations to act earlier to prevent people from reaching crisis point. That is the sort of clinical leadership that the Act has fostered. It will refocus the point of care towards more proactive community-based care, for the benefit of so many patients.
Grahame M. Morris
The Minister is defending fragmentation, but may I, as a former member of the Health Committee, remind him that Sir David Nicholson, the former chief exec of the NHS, summed up the situation last year by saying:
“You’ve got competition lawyers all over the place, causing enormous difficulty. We are getting, in my view, bogged down in a morass of competition law which is causing significant cost in the system”.
Is the Minister saying that the chief exec is wrong in his assessment?
Dr Poulter
The chief executive makes exactly the point. It was of course the Labour Government who introduced competition into the NHS. If the hon. Gentleman has a problem, he should take it up with his colleagues further along the Front Bench who they introduced competition into the NHS. Monitor, as the sector regulator, must now have regard to having better integrated services, reducing fragmentation and putting more emphasis on the best interests of patients.
The fourth effect of the Health and Social Care Act has been to provide clarity about existing NHS practices on patient choice and competition that were introduced by the previous Government. Under the Act, nothing changed from the rules laid down under Labour on how commissioners should behave when they procure services. That has been borne out, despite the myths and scare stories surrounding the Act. Simon Stevens, a former Labour special adviser under Tony Blair and now head of NHS England, said to the Health Committee that
“if the claim was that CCGs have to start putting all of their health service purchases out to public procurement, that is clearly not true and it isn’t happening”.
That was the current head of the NHS making it clear and putting the record straight on the Opposition’s scaremongering. The NHS agrees: the NHS Confederation stated in its briefing on the Bill:
“The current rules are clear that no-one can pursue competition in the NHS if it is not in the interests of patients.”
Our NHS finances bear that out. In the last financial year, spending on independent health care provision by commissioners was shown to be about 6%, compared with 5% under Labour in 2010. That is hardly evidence of the sweeping privatisation of NHS services, but it is evidence of clinical commissioners making informed, clinically led choices for the benefit of patients.
Dr Steve Kell, chair of the NHS Clinical Commissioners, has made it clear that there is not a clinical commissioning group in the land that has any kind of “privatisation agenda”. What CCGs all share is clinical expertise and an unflinching desire to improve local health services for their patients. This Government will not stand in their way or play party politics with the judgments of doctors and nurses who are making the right choices in the best interests of their patients. Indeed, Dr Michael Dixon, chair of the NHS Alliance, and others wrote in The Daily Telegraph this morning:
“As NHS doctors, we are deeply concerned about the misguided and potentially disruptive National Health Service Bill being debated today.”
Working with other key health care organisations, NHS England—I hope that Labour Members will agree with this uncontroversial point—has set out how the health system must change over the next five years, looking at new models of care delivery and taking a more integrated approach to the delivery of health and care. Earlier in the year, the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, made it clear that if the procurement, patient choice and competition rules stood in the way of delivering the required changes, he would say so. Clearly, he has not done so.
Let me be absolutely clear: the NHS England “Five Year Forward View” did not call for further legislative change—that is what the Bill proposes—or for structural upheaval or a return to Whitehall control of our NHS. I am sure that we can all agree that NHS England’s “Five Year Forward View” was an important piece of work that deserves to have broad cross-party consensus.
Politicians now need to leave the NHS to get on with the job: let the doctors and nurses run the NHS as we have freed them up to do. We can support leaders in the system, and help to free more money for front-line care through improved NHS procurement, better estate management and reduced spending on temporary staff. However, making top-down legislative change to the system, as the hon. Member for Eltham proposes, would be disastrous at a time when we should focus on supporting our NHS to deliver better care for patients.
It is important to look at what the Bill would do. It is quite simply wrong to believe that removing the parts of the 2012 Act that relate to the competition will stop competition law applying to our NHS.
Mr Anderson
Is the Minister happy that, because of competition, groups such as Care UK have cut professional health workers’ pay by between 35% and 40%? How does he expect those people to feel motivated to go to work every day when they cannot afford to pay their mortgage or to look after their kids properly? Is that really what we should expect in this day and age?
Dr Poulter
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that Care UK provides a lot of the care in the social care sphere. I understand that much of the social care commissioned by local authorities is already provided by the private sector. The big idea of the right hon. Member for Leigh is about driving further integration. Under the integration plans that he has outlined, more power would of course be given to companies such as Care UK. We support integration, but it must be done in a way that always meets the best needs of local patients, and it must be evolutionary change rather than revolutionary change, working with front-line professionals to do the best for their patients.
Dr Poulter
Let me make a little progress on the damage that the Bill might do. As I have said, the belief that removing the parts of the 2012 Act that relate to competition will stop competition law applying to our NHS is simply wrong. That important point goes to the heart of what the right hon. Member for Leigh has said.
Dr Poulter
If the hon. Lady will let me make some progress, I will come to her shortly.
The fact that such a belief is wrong was recently made clear in correspondence from Simon Stevens to the right hon. Gentleman—from one former Labour special adviser to another—which stated:
“We are, as appropriate, required to observe European procurement regulations, originally introduced in 2006, and related UK law. In everything we do we are also required to exercise our functions effectively, efficiently and economically. As a result we are advised that a blanket contracting ban would not be permissible.”
It would not be permissible because of regulations introduced by the previous Labour Government. That is another reminder that Labour introduced competition into the NHS.
As I explained earlier, under changes introduced by the previous Labour Government, health commissioners were subject to EU competition law for several years prior to the Act, and they would continue to be subject to it even if the Act was repealed.
Dr Whiteford
The points the Minister is making about competition take us back to the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. He must be aware that the NHS across these islands is developing in very different directions, and competition has not been at the heart of what has happened in other parts of the UK. I want him to give us cast-iron guarantees today that there will be no obligation on the NHS in Scotland to open up because of that trade agreement, even if the UK decides in its favour. What opportunities are there, if the treaty exposes the Scottish Government to—
Dr Poulter
I will come to TTIP shortly, and I think that I will be able to reassure the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Angus (Mr Weir).
The Health and Social Care Act put in place an alternative route to the courts, through Monitor, to address abuses of the rules around procurement. The Bill would remove that alternative route, meaning that future complaints under the law would result in hugely costly legal processes for health care commissioners, and complaints would be considered by the courts, rather than by Monitor, a health expert regulator. That cannot be good for patients. The Bill would result in more money for the lawyers, and much less money for our NHS and the patients that it looks after.
Another important point is that by favouring NHS over non-NHS providers, the Bill would be a move against the voluntary and charity sector providers, such as Macmillan and Marie Curie, who have done so much to help care for patients for many years.
Jeremy Lefroy
I am glad that my hon. Friend has mentioned Macmillan. At the moment, Macmillan is in the middle of tendering for end-of-life and cancer care in Staffordshire, which hon. Members have mentioned. Although the integration that the tender requires is absolutely vital—I think that it is supported by all Members, including the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) in a recent article—one of the real problems involves the mechanism. The fact is that the integration seems to require the tender to be for the entire service, rather than for just a small contract, say, to help with integration. Will my hon. Friend comment on that, because this is one of the problems at the heart of the matter? We do not want large private companies to run our cancer and end-of-life services.
Dr Poulter
In a moment I will address in a little more detail a couple of the points that were raised. I reassure my hon. Friend that the section 75 regulations that underpin the 2012 Act, which are almost identical to regulations that the previous Government were involved with, outline very clearly, under regulation 10, that integrated service, or encouraging co-operation between providers in the interests of patients should not be seen as anti-competitive. Regulation 15 makes it clear that Monitor cannot direct a commissioner to hold a competitive tender. There is strong support throughout those regulations, as there is throughout the 2012 Act, for integrated service delivery in the best interests of patients, where that is appropriate.
Dr Poulter
I am going to make some progress—I hope the hon. Lady will forgive me—because Mr Deputy Speaker is looking at me.
Dr Poulter
Points were made about the voluntary and charitable sector supporting innovative new models of care. Through the Newquay pathfinder project Age UK has provided volunteer support to vulnerable older people considered at risk. Under the home scheme the British Red Cross provides volunteer support to patients in their homes, which is aimed at preventing admission to, or facilitating discharge from, hospital. The charity has care in the home contracts with more than 30 NHS trusts and social services departments, and the scheme enables reduced admissions, increased convenience to patients, and many other associated benefits.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) mentioned Macmillan. I like to talk about Macmillan, which has long provided vital support to patients right across the UK. It is collaborating with doctors in Staffordshire to transform cancer care and end-of-life care, and together they aim to commission care right across the patient journey. In cancer, that means commissioning prevention and health promotion, ensuring early diagnosis and prompt treatment through survivorship and improving end-of-life care.
In reality, the only route proposed in the Bill for recourse against unfair treatment by commissioners is to take us back to the previous Labour Government’s competition laws in 2006 and open up legal challenge through the courts. Only private providers with enough resource behind them are likely to be able to afford to exist in that court-based system, to pay high legal fees, and to invest in providing NHS care to patients, and smaller providers, especially charities, will lose out. Surely we do not want to see that in our NHS—an NHS in which, I hope we all agree, charitable and small local health care organisations have something important to contribute for the benefit of patients.
Before I conclude, I must briefly address some of the misleading commentary that has surrounded TTIP, which is serving only to distract from the real debate about our NHS. First, may I state that there is absolutely no agenda whatsoever to privatise our NHS through the back door? TTIP cannot force the privatisation of public services by EU member states. This position has been made explicitly clear by us and by the relevant negotiating parties. To suggest otherwise would be disingenuous and, frankly, wrong. I encourage Members to look at the recent negotiating mandate published by the European Commission, where this position is made absolutely clear. I note the comments of Ignacio Garcia Bercero, EU chief negotiator, on the record at the end of round 7 negotiations—
Dr Poulter
I am addressing the hon. Lady’s point, so I hope she will let me do so. Ignacio Garcia Bercero said:
“I wish…to stress that our approach to services negotiations excludes any commitment on public services, and the governments remain at any time free to decide that certain services should be provided by the public sector.”
That is a very clear reassurance, and I hope it will be accepted by all hon. Members. I will give way just once more, because I do not want to test Mr Deputy Speaker’s patience as I come to a conclusion.
Dr Whiteford
I am grateful to the Minister, but my understanding is that the Commission has said that if one part of the UK market is opened up through privatisation—perfectly democratically, as it could be—then all parts will be opened up. I want his assurances that Scotland will not be forced, by the back door, to privatise its NHS on the coattails of this House.
Dr Poulter
The Government’s health care reforms ensured that, as under the last Labour Government, day-to-day decisions of care delivery became the responsibility of clinically led NHS commissioners. It is for the local NHS to decide which providers, whether from the public, private or voluntary sectors, can best meet the needs of their patients and deliver high-quality care.
Dr Poulter
I will give way one more time in a moment, and then that really will, I am afraid, be the lot, because I know that Mr Deputy Speaker would like me to come to a conclusion.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I do not know what is going on with this speech. I know that the Minister is a distinguished medical person, but he is presenting the speech with so much jargon and such technical terms that very few people out there will understand the main thrust of it. The only thing many people have understood in the last few minutes is the back-door privatisation.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
That is absolutely not a point of order, but we will hear from some other speakers if we can get to the end of this speech. We might then hear some other parts of the debate.
Dr Poulter
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I have mentioned the benefit to patients many times in my speech, because that is, after all, what I care about as a doctor and what I care about as a Health Minister, and what I hope all hon. Members care about; I know that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) does so.
Additionally, and contrary to claims made by some, TTIP will not prevent any future Government from changing the legal framework for the provision of NHS services. Neither will it prevent the termination of the private provision of such a service in accordance with the law or contracts entered into, as is already the case today. The reassurances that we and the European Commission offered were sufficient for the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), a previous shadow Health Secretary, when he stated:
“On the NHS....my direct discussions with the EU’s chief negotiator have helped produce an EU promise to fully protect our health service including, as the chief negotiator says in a letter to me, so that: ‘any ISDS provisions in TTIP could have no impact on the UK’s sovereign right to make changes to the NHS.”
If it was good enough for the right hon. Gentleman—
Dr Poulter
I will give way to the hon. Member for Eltham and then I will conclude.
Clive Efford
That really will not wash. The Minister is saying that we must trust the Government and that they will not allow TTIP to apply to the national health service. The Bill says that this House will be sovereign; this House will decide whether TTIP applies to our national health service. Does he support that?
Dr Poulter
I was simply quoting the reassurances that his right hon. Friend had given to all hon. Members, which was that
“any ISDS provisions in TTIP could have no impact on the UK’s sovereign right to make changes to the NHS”.
If TTIP is good enough for the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne , it should be good enough for everyone in the Labour party.
John Healey
Would the Minister be good enough to concede that that has absolutely nothing to do with what the Government have been arguing; that is to do with the EU and their negotiation. The Trade Minister in charge has said that he does not want the NHS to be excluded in the way that we want.
Dr Poulter
No; I am simply quoting what the right hon. Gentleman has already put on the record about reassurances that he has received from the EU about an EU trade settlement. Surely, if the reassurances were good enough for him when he wanted to communicate them more broadly to his colleagues, and more broadly to members of the public, they are good enough now. It is very difficult to climb down from those reassurances, which he has previously given, and in the remarks I have made I have further reassured the House about the protection that this Government have made for the NHS in TTIP.
I am immensely proud of the way our NHS has already responded to the challenges of a growing and ageing population, meeting increased demand through a purpose and drive to improve the quality of patient care. That is why our NHS was recently ranked No. 1 in the Commonwealth Fund’s assessment of 11 global health care systems. This is at a time of unprecedented challenge to public finances across the globe, and testifies to the incredibly hard work of NHS staff and a very tough choice by this Government to protect our NHS budget and increase it by £12.7 billion between 2010 and 2015—a decision that the right hon. Member for Leigh called irresponsible but one of which we are very proud.
I remind the House of the words of the right hon. Member for Leigh when he was a Health Minister defending Labour’s record on introducing private providers into our NHS:
“I think the NHS can finally move beyond the polarising debates of the last decade over private or public sector provision”.
I agree: it is definitely time to move on. Our NHS focus needs to be on delivering for patients, so let us put distractions aside and let our hard-working doctors, nurses and health professionals get on with the job.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on his excellent opening speech—I think it was one of the best speeches I have heard in the House—and on introducing his Bill so that we can review and reform some of the more pernicious effects of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. One of the worst was to force market tendering of services, meaning that millions of pounds are wasted on the process, money that should be spent on improving front-line patient care.
As a member of the Health Committee, I am very concerned about the increasing role that private companies are paying in providing NHS services. We recently looked at what is happening in Stoke and Staffordshire. There have been a few references to that in this debate and I will talk some more about it, but we looked at it under the label of the integrated care pioneers pilot. I want to talk more about that development as an example of just what can happen under this Government’s market framework—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. There are a lot of conversations and I am struggling to hear the hon. Lady. If we need to have the conversations, can we turn them down a little?
Barbara Keeley
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The clinical commissioning groups involved plan to tender by summer 2015 a £1.2 billion contract to deliver cancer services and end-of-life care for 876,000 people across the area. The witnesses we heard from made it clear that commissioning on a disease-specific basis like this is risky. There are only a few small-scale examples of that being done anywhere, and nothing on the scale of this project. Despite the risk, we heard some worrying things about local people or local MPs not being listened to and about a lack of consultation with or involvement of hospital-based clinicians. The Minister has just referred a number of times to letting doctors get on with running the NHS, but the CCGs involved in driving this pilot are not even involving or listening to local clinicians. I and other colleagues on the Committee found that bodies such as Healthwatch England and Macmillan Cancer Support were cheerleaders for—and in Macmillan’s case, a funder of—development work on a project that could end up privatising cancer and end-of-life care for almost a million people. I for one found that disturbing. I felt, and I know that some of my colleagues did too, that there was a conflict of interest. Healthwatch England was meant to be the consumer champion of health and care.
By contrast with what Government Members have said, there was also a fair amount of concern among Committee members about the role of Macmillan Cancer Support in funding the development work when many believe that the money they give to Macmillan goes directly to cancer care. Indeed, the example I saw on the Macmillan website yesterday was that a donation would pay for a Macmillan nurse for a period to help people living with cancer and their families receive essential medical, practical and emotional support. It does not appear to be a selling point for that charity that funds would be used on a project to privatise end-of-life and cancer care in Staffordshire and Stoke.
Jeremy Lefroy
As I have already said, I have major concerns about the form of the contract. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) wrote, and I say this in defence of Macmillan:
“This is the context for our new cancer contract and we should not pass knee-jerk judgments upon new ideas which aim for better outcomes and efficiency.”
That is what Macmillan is after.
Barbara Keeley
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that comment, but the point is that Macmillan Cancer Support is using money fundraised by the public in ways that I do not think the public would approve of. That was the key thing we explored. It is not at all clear, if we look at the Macmillan website, how it is using approaching £1 million of the public’s money, donated on that basis.
Valerie Vaz
My hon. Friend mentions conflicts of interest. Is she aware that one of the companies bidding for the privatisation of cancer services is UnitedHealth Group, which was advised by the chief executive of NHS England?
Barbara Keeley
Indeed. Now that the shortlist for bidding has been announced for end-of-life care, we find that five of the shortlisted bidders are private companies, with only two NHS trusts on the list. For cancer care, there are three private companies and two NHS trusts. Given the seemingly headlong drive for change we found in those commissioning this large and risky contract, a great number of questions were left unanswered. For instance, despite the key role that GPs play in end-of-life care for patients choosing to die at home, the prime provider of end-of-life care will not have control over the actions of the GPs involved in that care unless a specific contract is drawn up and GPs are paid for extra tasks.
The contracts for cancer and end-of-life care are to be placed in early summer 2015, and I invite anybody with an interest in this to review the evidence and, in particular, the unanswered questions in the session the Health Committee held on 14 October. I have yet to find assurances in the evidence I have heard that the profit motive of private providers can be squared with the objective of improving cancer care and end-of-life care for patients.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
Cancer care for north Wales is provided by bodies in the north-west of England. MPs on the Government Benches are saying that I, as a Welsh MP, should not have a vote on this matter. What does my hon. Friend think about that? Should I be concerned about standards of care and the privatisation of the English health service? My constituents will suffer if it is hollowed out and privatised by the Government.
Barbara Keeley
My hon. Friend absolutely should be concerned and I know that he is.
One of the elements of cancer and end-of-life care given to us as an example of where improvement is needed in Staffordshire and Stoke was patient transport. However, we know in the north-west that going to new private providers does not tend to help. We have already had a negative experience since patient transport was contracted out to the bus company Arriva.
A number of my constituents have had problems with Arriva’s patient transport. One contacted me following a wait of more than three hours for ambulance transport to be arranged for her husband. He has terminal cancer and needed to be transported back to Salford Royal after oncology treatment at the Christie hospital. That was the second time in three weeks that this terminally ill patient had to wait two or three hours for transport. Staff at the Christie hospital told my constituent that such long waits were common, despite the fact that many oncology patients are very sick.
Mr Slaughter
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, particularly because the Minister did not in the course of his very long speech. Of course, that might have been because the main emergency hospital in my constituency, Charing Cross, is being demolished, losing all but 24 of its 360 beds, losing the best stroke unit in the country and losing its A and E, which, according to board papers, is moving from the site. There will be no emergency consultancy services at all. Is not what is happening on the ground very different from the jargon-filled rubbish we heard from the Minister today?
Barbara Keeley
Absolutely, and I am saying what is happening on the ground to a terminally ill cancer patient.
In her letter to Arriva, my constituent told the company:
“Your company should not have this contract if it displays such a lack of concern for very ill patients causing distress to both them and their relatives”.
Not only was the delay unacceptable to a terminally ill patient, but the reply to my constituent’s complaint was one of the worst I have ever seen, as we are talking about gobbledegook. For instance, the explanation for the long wait included the following sentence:
“When an outpatient booking is made, the expected outbound blocking is automatically populated, using the throughput assumption.”
The jargon that starts at the top permeates down even to the complaint handling. It took a lot more letters to get an apology for such appalling service and such a poor reply.
Another constituent has told me of unsuitable transport and untrained staff—we have heard about this happening across the country—sent to the home of a patient who needed to use a wheelchair. That meant that the patient missed their appointment and an important investigation of their health was delayed by a number of weeks. I trust that the commissioners driving the privatisation of cancer services in Staffordshire and Stoke are aware of just how wrong transport services can go with a private transport provider.
This Government’s measures have put competition and privatisation above the needs of NHS patients. The Health and Social Care Act has put pressure on regulators to make clinical commissioning groups and NHS trusts adopt tendering processes that are not in the best interest of patients. That means wasted money, resources and time. This Bill would remove these damaging reforms, and patient care would be prioritised instead of unnecessary competition. The Bill would not prevent competition within the NHS, but it would prevent competition at the expense of patient care.
Our national health service is different from other sectors and needs a different approach. Integration to improve patient care needs collaboration rather than competition. It is a great pleasure to be in the Chamber today to speak and vote in support of the Bill.
Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
I am grateful to have the opportunity to make a few short remarks. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) is right to be concerned about any problem that occurs in the NHS, but I am sure she would accept that it is an enormous organisation and that the key point is that when things go wrong, the lessons are learned and things are put right. Most of the life of the NHS has been under Conservative Governments, and we on the Government Benches are as proud of the NHS as Labour Members are.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on being a strong voice for Labour principles, but I am concerned that the effect of his Bill will be to undermine the operational independence of the NHS, cause disruption and introduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Putting powers back with the Secretary of State through the re-establishment of powers of direction is going in the wrong direction. Preventing illness, diagnosing and treating patients are not political activities. They should be in the hands of professionals and the operational independence of the NHS means that clinical considerations are paramount. When I was a health spokesperson, I went to look at health systems in Europe, and the key point I took away was that the best systems were those with a lot of clinical input in management.
It is not necessary to rewrite the Act. Instead, the changes we have made need to work their way through. The shadow Secretary of State said that the competition element is dominant in the Act, but that is not true. The procurement policy is set out to secure the needs of patients and improve quality and efficiency. I want to give an example from my constituency of how the reforms are working. Royston is part of the Peterborough and Cambridge CCG. Before that was so, we had a proposal for the redevelopment of Royston hospital. A Royston hospital action group was formed, while the friends of Royston hospital were concerned about the proposals, which were top down. However, Tom Dutton, the CCG strategic lead, has worked tirelessly with the NHS and the local community, as has the local chairman, Dr John Hedges, a GP in Royston, and they understand local needs, so we are now getting tailored provision that suits the needs of my constituents.
I meet the CCG, councillors, local groups and other stakeholders every six weeks, and I believe that we are now getting a service for Royston and a proposal that meet local needs. The £1 billion tender for older people’s services was in our CCG area. The hon. Member for Eltham criticised the cost, but we had a consultation meeting in Royston that 150 local people attended, while 250 local people filled out the questionnaire. The proposal and consultation will have cost money, yes, but the end result was that the tender process was won by the Uniting Care partnership, an NHS partnership involving Addenbrooke’s hospital and the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS trust, and it is now delivering more joined-up care.
Dr Huppert
I was delighted with that outcome. One of the successes I hope the hon. and learned Gentleman will mention is the better joint working between acute care, mental health care and community services to avoid delays in the transfer of care. This could be a very good outcome for the NHS and patients.
Sir Oliver Heald
That is exactly the point I was going to make. The process, which involved local people, has resulted in a reform that gives us the sort of joined-up care the hon. Gentleman mentions.
To conclude, the Bill seeks to prevent privatisation that is not happening on the ground, while some of the changes we have made are bringing positive benefits for people in my constituency.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
I would like to offer my support for the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on bringing it to the House.
Members will be pleased that I intend to keep my comments brief. Our NHS is a monumental achievement and one that my party remains deeply proud of. There are many people alive today who remember what life was like before the NHS and who would never go back to a time when the poor could not afford treatment for preventable illnesses. That is the generation that truly understands what the NHS means and why we must protect it.
That is not to say that people today take the NHS for granted. In fact my inbox, like those of other hon. Members, has been overflowing with e-mails from constituents worried about the future of our health service. They want the principle of free and equal access protected and the needs of patients put before profit, as they should be. I and those people are afraid of the direction the NHS is heading in under this Government. We see the Tories wedging open the door for private companies to come in and deliver services, and we see hospitals encouraged to take on ever more private patients.
People do not believe the Government’s spin: they know that the changes are part of the creeping privatisation being encouraged by the Tories and that the reorganisation in the 2012 Act was all about Tory ideology, not patient care. The reorganisation wasted £3 billion and has seen millions more spent on tendering exercises and competition lawyers which could have been spent on treatment for those who genuinely needed it. They also know that they cannot trust a Health Secretary who has previously backed calls to dismantle the NHS or a party that brought the NHS to the brink of collapse the last time it was in power. Back then, it took a Labour Government to save the NHS, and now history is repeating itself.
The constituents who have written to me, the people I was proud to join on the NHS march earlier this year and those I joined last night for a vigil outside Parliament understand what is at stake. The NHS is more than just a service; it is a principle of fairness. Illness and accidents strike us all at some point, often without warning and leaving us little time to plan, and before the NHS, this kind of misfortune could destroy lives and condemn families to extreme poverty. Now we have a service that says nobody, whether rich or poor, should have their life ruined by misfortune. That is the principle that my hon. Friends and I are standing up for today.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I welcome the Bill and congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on introducing it; I shall be supporting its Second Reading today.
My support derives mainly from my and my constituents’ experiences over several years of some of the workings of the Health Act 2006, introduced by the previous Government, and the 2012 Act, introduced by this Government. In particular, two matters have been, and continue to be, of great significance: first, the two Francis inquiries into cases of dreadful care in my constituency, and secondly, the reports that have had such a major influence on the entire NHS. Just yesterday, my wife was giving a lecture to medical students on aspects of the Francis reports. It is vital that these lessons, particularly on patient safety and zero avoidable harm, are not forgotten, which is why I introduced a Bill on the subject two weeks ago.
The second concerns a more recent matter referred to already today: the review, supported by Macmillan, of cancer and end-of-life services in north Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Stafford and Cannock, which has resulted in a tender of all these services to be managed through an integrator. Just to correct the record, it is not just private companies on the tender—NHS organisations are also on it—but I still have major concerns. I am looking at this through the eyes of patients everywhere. The NHS must not be about structures or be in thrall to political dogma of any kind; it must be about safety and quality of care for all patients. I hope the Government might see the Bill in that way and use it as an opportunity to make improvements to both the 2006 Act and the 2012 Act.
I welcome clause 1. During the trust special administrator process that we had to go through, the inability of providers and commissioners to speak to one another—in some cases because of so-called commercial confidentiality —was ridiculous and without doubt delayed the process. At certain points, the whole process cried out for someone, if necessary the Secretary of State, to put everyone in a room for a day with instructions not to leave until everything had been sorted out. However, everybody was walking on eggshells in case they did something that might result in a judicial review and a reversion to square one. That was not in the interests of patients. That is not to be critical of those involved: for the most part they tried very hard and we got a better result than at some points we feared.
I want to make a serious point about clause 1 and the desire for the Bill to place the running of the NHS firmly in the hands of the Secretary of State. It is vital that there should not be too much hands-on running of the NHS by the Secretary of State—the British Medical Association, which has some very positive comments about the Bill, says that as well.
I am short of time, so let me conclude by talking about cancer and end-of-life services, which have been raised today. The problem is the way in which the NHS is funded and the fact that the tender is for all services involved in those pathways. It would have been much more sensible for the tender to help the work of integration, which would have involved a much smaller amount, rather than the full amount of services.
Clive Efford
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
The House proceeded to a Division.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.
Clive Efford
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I understand that, in order to go into Committee, this Bill requires a resolution from the Government. Given the overwhelming number of people who turned up on a Friday to support it, would it not be churlish of the Government not to pass that resolution and make sure that this Bill goes into Committee forthwith?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
As you pointed out, it is something for the Government, but not me, to take on board.
Zero Hours Contracts Bill
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
In politics, it is said that there are no final victories and no final defeats; that each generation must fight many of the same battles that the generation before have, and that the generation after may have to fight as well. Today, I am fighting for the same thing that people of every generation have fought for: the right to decent and secure conditions and terms of employment.
It is not a great ask. A well-paid and steady job is the bedrock on which people build their lives. It is the starting point for planning for the future, and the platform of stability needed to pay the bills, meet the rent, pay the mortgage and start a family. Those are not extravagances, but the minimum that should be available to any person who is prepared to work to pay their way in a wealthy nation such as ours. Yet that stability and security is denied to millions of workers in this country. Increasingly, people are finding themselves plagued by job insecurity, not knowing from one day to the next whether they will be working or earning.
In recent years, the rise in the number of those feeling insecure at work has been startling. In 2011, 6.5 million people surveyed said that they felt insecure in their work. By this year, that number had almost doubled to 12 million people.
Ian Mearns
Let me make some progress. What we have witnessed is not so much an economic recovery as an economic transformation. Almost daily, the Government boast about job creation in the private sector, but the truth is that the jobs that were lost due to the global economic crash and the Government cuts have been largely replaced by low-skilled, low-waged and, sadly, insecure jobs. It is leaving large swathes of the work force living on, or just above, the breadline.
As they are so keen to remind us, the Conservatives have a long-term economic plan, but it is not one for the working person. Nowhere is that clearer than in the explosion in the use of zero-hours contracts. As recently as last year, the coalition was claiming that slightly more than 200,000 people were employed on zero-hours contracts. The true figure, as revealed by the Office for National Statistics, was in fact seven times higher than Government Ministers admitted—a staggering 1.4 million people engaged in zero-hours employment contracts.
Zero-hours contracts—if they are used at all—are supposed to be used for short-term or seasonal work, occupying a niche in the labour market, but the reality is that they have become the norm across many sectors.
Mr Nuttall
The hon. Gentleman makes reference to the number of zero-hours contracts that exist at the moment. Back in 2000, the ONS estimated that there were 225,000 people on zero-hours contracts. Why is it all right for people to be on a zero-hours contract under a Labour Government, but not under a Conservative- led one?
Ian Mearns
If the hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would have heard me point out that Ministers in his own Government were admitting to 200,000 such contracts only three years ago, but there are now 1.4 million of them, which is a massive burgeoning in the use and exploitation of workers through the abuse of zero-hours contracts.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech on the use of zero-hours contracts, but is not the proof of the pudding always in the eating? Although unemployment has gone down in this country, the tax-take to the Treasury from income tax has stayed flat, despite the Treasury predicting a huge increase. That shows that we have under-employment and a massive explosion in zero-hours contracts.
Ian Mearns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. Government Members celebrate the fact that 3 million workers have been taken out of tax completely, but they are also celebrating the fact that 2 million of them are earning £200 or less a week. I do not think that is anything to celebrate in this day and age.
Given the variety of employers now using zero-hours contracts, from Sports Direct to Buckingham palace even, it is clear that they are not just filling a niche; they are also being exploited by unscrupulous employers looking to dodge their responsibilities to their staff.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman talks about employers exploiting their workers by giving them zero-hours contracts. I presume that within that group he includes all the Labour councils that employ people that way. Has he done any investigations into why so many Labour councils employ so many people on zero-hours contracts?
Ian Mearns
As a matter of fact, I have. I would ask colleagues engaged in public service provision up and down the country to think very deeply about their employment practices. I do not condone it, but I know that for some workers zero-hours contracts are a handy way of gaining part-time employment, but only part-time employment. Many find it very difficult to sustain an ordinary family life on a zero-hours contract.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Is not the fact of the matter that the Bill, if we manage to pass it, would prevent anyone, whether a Labour council, a Tory council or even a Tory MP, from employing people on zero-hours contracts? They would be abolished entirely.
Ian Mearns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The Bill seeks to curtail the use of zero-hours contracts severely.
Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is being generous in giving way. He is making a powerful case for how morally repugnant that kind of employment is, but does he also agree that more enlightened employers say that it is actually a lazy form of employing people and that, with more thought, those employees could have proper contracts and proper hours?
Ian Mearns
I will be developing that point in due course.
The gross weekly average wage for a zero-hours contract worker is £236, which is a full £246 less than the average wage for those in regular, full-time employment. We really need to think about the fact that in a nation such as ours, and in this day and age, so many people are employed on irregular hours and earn a mere £236 a week. Workplaces that utilise zero-hours contracts have a higher proportion of staff on low pay, and those employed on zero-hours contracts also work fewer hours—they work an average of 21 hours a week—than those in other part-time jobs who are not on zero-hours contracts, who work an average of 31 hours a week.
Zero-hours contracts are an employer’s paradise. In fact, they are a one-way street, because they demand total flexibility and commitment from individual employees but offer very little in return from the employer.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does he accept that while those employers want it all their own way, they often penalise young people, in particular? For instance, when people cannot agree to work an extra shift, they find that they are offered no shifts the following week.
Ian Mearns
Absolutely. It is that sort of intermittent work pattern that is often exploited, because sadly in many parts of the country there is a surplus of labour, with many people either unemployed or underemployed.
Employees must agree to make themselves available for work but receive no guarantee of work in return. Workers find themselves being called into work at the drop of a hat or having their shifts cancelled with only a couple of hours’ notice or, in some cases, after they have already incurred the expense of travelling to work or arranging child care. They turn up at their place of work, only to be told, “We’ve nothing for you today.”
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that putting people in that position limits their ability to be economically engaged, because they cannot plan or apply for mortgages and all the rest of it? That might be to the benefit of the exploitative employer, but it does nothing to help the economy or people by giving them security of employment.
Ian Mearns
I could not agree more. I do not see the benefit to a local economy of having so many people on low pay. A low pay, low disposable income economy is not good for other small businesses in the area that are trying to sell their goods and services in the local market, which is deprived of disposable income.
Employees are expected to perform all the roles of a regular employee but have no entitlement to sick leave, holiday pay, overtime payments or many of the hard-won rights and protections that have been gained by work forces over the years.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is very generous in giving way; I realise that he is struggling to maintain the flow of his speech. Will he join me in celebrating the work of our citizens advice bureaux? Mine in Musselburgh highlighted in its annual report the case of a man who had gone from five days a week on a zero-hours contract to two days. His employer would not pay him statutory sick pay or paternity pay, and then it turned out that the employer was not even paying him the minimum wage. It is just not good enough.
Ian Mearns
My hon. Friend’s example exemplifies the exploitative practices and abuse by some employers. For Government Members to deny that this is happening is unbelievable.
These are employment practices from another era, which is where they should remain. Zero-hours contracts are a new manifestation of the casualisation of the labour market, a race to the bottom in wages and terms and conditions, and a return to the bad old days of workers queuing at the factory gates, the shipyard or the pit and hoping to be picked to be employed for the day.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
The growth of zero-hours contracts, together with other practices such as the appearance of payroll companies and umbrella companies, and the growth of bogus self-employment, means that in certain sectors we are seeing the virtual abolition of permanent and full-time work.
Ian Mearns
I could not agree more. As was pointed out earlier, it is about sloppy planning on the part of employers. If they looked at the way they employ people, they could rationalise the way in which their production and output work, and it would be better for the company if they did so.
Dockers—I meet old dockers, and sons and daughters of dockers—remember queuing for work every day, and being told to “sling their hook” when there was none. When sufficient men had been selected for work on a particular day, the rest were told to go home. The same practice has acquired a modern veneer. Rather than queuing at their place of work, people simply receive a text a couple of hours before a shift starts saying, “No work today.” This creates a desperate and easily exploitable work force.
I am sure every Member is aware of the horror stories we have heard concerning adult social care, where 307,000 workers are employed on zero-hours contracts. Employers frequently use such contracts to circumvent their obligation to pay the national minimum wage.
Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)
Fast-food companies such as McDonald’s spend thousands and thousands of pounds in this place, providing hospitality to right hon. and hon. Members at receptions. Will my hon. Friend join me in asking colleagues who feel it necessary to go along and sup the wine of people who are profiteering from zero-hour contracts for young people either to refuse to go to such a reception or, if they do go, to ask how many workers are employed by the company on zero-hours contracts?
Ian Mearns
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. In our community leadership role, as Members of Parliament representing constituencies throughout the country, we should be giving the lead on this by not giving succour to companies which, as he says, are engaged in these exploitative practices.
Mr George Howarth
My hon. Friend mentioned the old dock employment practices, which were known in Liverpool as the “pen system”, for all the obvious reasons. Is it not instructive that it was a Labour Government, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, who abolished that system? Who abolished that in its turn? The Thatcher Government.
Ian Mearns
That comes as no surprise. The deregulation of workplace practices is the stock in trade of Members on the Government Benches.
Anyone who has had any experience of the hospitality sector will be familiar with workers being too frightened to turn down shifts or to make a complaint at work because of the fear that they will be “zeroed out” and employed for zero hours per week—in other words, no work this week and no work next week. Since the recession, there have been countless stories of employers who have fired their staff only to rehire them on zero-hours contracts, meaning that their workers are no longer entitled to sick leave, holiday pay, and other rights and protections.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. He mentioned adult social care workers. A constituent who came to see me highlighted just how little economic sense zero-hours contracts make for the taxpayer as well. From one week to the next, he may or may not be able to pay his rent and may need housing benefit support. That creates a total mess for the systems that have to provide support to these people on very insecure work contracts. The cost to the taxpayer of sorting out that mess is adding to the problem. Employers need to step up to the mark.
Ian Mearns
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point.
With regard to people working in the adult social care sector, it is right that we want the very best quality of care for the most vulnerable people in society—the elderly, the frail, the disabled and so on—who rely on these social care contracts, yet we expect people who are being paid next to nothing to conduct that high-quality care. I find that bizarre.
Ian Lavery
Is my hon. Friend aware of the situation at HMP Northumberland, where Sodexo, a French catering company, has privatised the prison and sacked or made redundant more than a third of the work force? It does not have enough people to make the prison safe, but it is bringing in people on banked-hours and zero-hours contracts. That is an outrage.
Ian Mearns
I could not agree more.
I was talking about the hospitality sector. Whether we allow this exploitation and abuse to continue is a question not just of whether these contracts are fair on the employee but of what type of society we want to live in and what type of economy we want to work in. Do we really expect our sick and elderly to get the care they deserve when those we trust to care for them live in fear and trepidation, not knowing whether they will earn enough to keep the heating on or buy the weekly shop? Do we really think that we will reduce the benefits bill—the frequently stated intention of the Government—when only state subsidies for employers paying poverty wages are keeping our work force’s heads above water?
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a terrific speech, and I am proud to support his private Member’s Bill. I completely agree with his points about the hospitality sector. May I also draw his attention to very profitable companies where there is no real excuse for the employer to switch from existing contracts of employment to zero hours? I am thinking of JD Sports, for example, where 90% of the work force were switched from standard contracts to zero hours. It is sheer exploitation so that the workers cannot be paid pensions and other benefits.
Ian Mearns
My hon. Friend makes a pertinent and powerful point.
Given that there is an inextricable link between job security and consumer confidence, do we really think that workers with little or no job security, living in a climate of fear, are the foundation of a successful Britain in a globalised world? In the previous two centuries, tremendous and hard-fought-for progress was made on workers’ rights and conditions of service, and it is madness to spend the 21st century going into reverse.
The principle enshrined in the Bill is simple: if someone works regular hours they should have a regular fixed-hours contract, along with all the rights and protections afforded to regular workers. It is unacceptable that a person who works as a full-time employee, sometimes for many months, or even years, remains on a zero-hours contract.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend accept that this system does not work for the people who receive these services? Many constituents have said to me that they have people, particularly in the social care sector, coming into their homes and carrying out very personal tasks for them, and that they need consistency. They want to know that the same person is coming in and that they can trust that person, and that does not happen with zero-hours contracts.
Ian Mearns
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I repeat that if we really want to care for the most vulnerable in our society, we should have people in professional positions doing so on a regular basis. The familiarity of seeing the same person time and again is the bedrock of a care system.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
Is my hon. Friend aware of the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill, which is going through the other place at the moment? It has been described as “utter tosh” by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the previous Attorney-General, and is designed to increase the number of volunteers. The big society seems to be an idea whose time has gone. The Bill is designed to push people not into zero-hours contracts, but into zero-pay contracts.
Ian Mearns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I have the greatest admiration for many people up and down the country who devote their time freely to volunteering for a whole range of charitable and local causes. At the same time, however, I detest the fact that those volunteers are replacing full-time, paid jobs, because that is not good for the local economy.
My Bill states that if someone has been in a job for 12 weeks, they will become a regular employee entitled to a fixed and regular-hours contract with all the conditions of service that go with it. We will not prosper as a society or grow the type of economy we need as long as more than 1 million workers go to sleep at night not knowing whether they will have the much-needed earnings from the next morning’s shift. The Bill would allow workers to escape from the financial limbo in which many of them find themselves.
The Bill states that if someone’s employer requests or requires them to work without giving reasonable notice of three days, they should be paid time and a half for a shift ordered within those three days. It also states that if their employer cancels their shift at the last minute, they should not be plunged into financial instability but paid in full for the period in question.
That will take a measure of improved work force and production planning by employers, but that is not a bad thing in itself; it is actually good for companies to rationalise the way in which they engage people. The Bill would return a degree of mutuality and fairness to the employment arrangements with which many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society find themselves.
I am delighted that Labour Front Benchers have pledged to stamp out the abuse of zero-hours contracts when they are elected to government in 2015, but I do not believe that underpaid, insecure, zero-hours contract workers—our constituents—should have to wait until then.
People outside this place see zero-hours contracts for what they are: Victorian-era employment practices that have no place in a modern, 21st-century economy. Those employed on them know only too well what a zero-hours contract means: low pay, insecure work and zero rights in the workplace. If the Government will not support our plans, it will yet again fall to a Labour Government to protect the interests of ordinary working people doing a decent day’s work in workplaces up and down this nation.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on promoting his Bill and on his speech. I very much enjoyed the time I spent working with him on the Backbench Business Committee and I would like to think that everybody would agree that he is one of the nicest people in this House. I wish him well personally, even though I cannot particularly guarantee that I will support his Bill. I hope he will realise that that is not meant personally in any way, because he is a good guy and I certainly do not doubt his sincerity in promoting the Bill. Anyone could tell from his speech that he clearly feels very strongly about it, and I am all for people who stand up for things they believe in. The hon. Gentleman believes in this Bill and more power to his elbow for that. [Hon. Members: “But?”] There is a “but” and it would be quite a lengthy one if I had the time.
To be perfectly honest, I must say, and we need to get this on the record before the clock counts us out, that it is a bit rich for the Labour party to come here en masse to pretend that they are massively opposed to zero-hours contracts, when if one believes what one reads in the press—I am one of those who does, rightly or wrongly—it appears that some of the worst offenders are not only Labour councils, but Labour MPs. I do not know whether any of those in the Chamber want to fess up today, but perhaps those who skulked out quietly at the start of this debate are the guilty parties. I read somewhere—so it must be true—that 62 Labour MPs, which I reckon is about a quarter of them, actually employ their staff on zero-hours contracts, which I cannot believe.
Andy McDonald
That was a very nice attempt at a smear. Will the hon. Gentleman say where that was published and where the information is, and how about naming some names? He cannot just cast that out on to the water as if it were true.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman’s problem and mine is that the unnamed Labour MPs do not, for some reason, admit to it. They do not come out and say that they use zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
I will in a second. We can all understand why they do not want to draw attention to the fact.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman will give way when he is ready. The hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) does not have to remain standing. I do not want her knees to give way while she is waiting, because it could be a long time.
Philip Davies
I would be perfectly happy for us to have some way of admitting whether we employ our staff on zero-hours contracts. I do not, and I have no intention of doing so, but perhaps there might be something that we all sign.
Yasmin Qureshi
The issue is not about which councils or which MPs use zero-hours contracts. If the hon. Gentleman and the Government supported our Bill, everyone would be banned from using them. Surely the issue is about stopping the use of zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
I understand that point, and it was made in an intervention by the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) during the opening speech of the hon. Member for Gateshead. I do not want to embarrass the hon. Member for Wansbeck, but I am a big fan of his as well. He is also a good guy, and he stands up for what he believes in.
Philip Davies
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a second.
My problem with such an argument is that no law currently makes it compulsory to employ somebody on a zero-hours contract. Nothing forces any Labour council to employ somebody on a zero-hours contract; it is their choice. My point is that if the Labour party genuinely wanted to end zero-hours contract, the best thing to do would be to start by smartening up their act and to make sure that no Labour MPs or councils employ people on such contracts.
Philip Davies
There is not much time left, but I will do my best to squeeze in the hon. Gentleman.
It is not just any old Labour councils that go for zero-hours contracts. I know that Bury council, the council of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), is one of the worst offenders, but so is the council in Doncaster, my home town. People in Doncaster have the honour, the privilege or the misfortune—I do not know which, but we can all choose an appropriate adjective—not just to have the Leader of the Opposition as one of their MPs, but to have their three local MPs in the shadow Cabinet. They are blessed with highly talented people, including the Leader of the Opposition, as their local MPs. If the abolition of zero-hours contracts was so important for the Labour party, one would think that its leader, who is the Leader of the Opposition, might just have enough clout in Doncaster, with an elected Labour mayor and a majority Labour council, to encourage it to get rid of zero-hours contract. There are two things at play. Either the Labour party really has no intention of getting rid of zero-hours contracts and does not really care about them, or the Leader of the Opposition has so little clout within his party, and so few persuasive skills, that he cannot even persuade a Labour council and an elected Labour mayor to do it.
Philip Davies
I am going to call the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan) my hon. Friend, because he is a great man, a fellow member of the Select Committee. I know that has probably finished off his career for good, but he is a great man. I give way to him, because he has been waiting patiently.
Jim Sheridan
I am sorry I stood up. First, I plead not guilty to employing people on zero-hours contracts—not guilty, your honour. I would also quite like to exonerate my local authority from engaging people on zero-hours contracts. Not only does it not engage people on zero-hours contracts, but it pays them the living wage.
Philip Davies
I very much welcome that intervention. To be honest, I would never have thought that the hon. Gentleman was one of the people who used zero-hours contracts. He is a good man and he does not only stand up for what he believes in; he practises what he preaches. I take my hat off to him for that.
We have a good process of elimination going on here. If we could just get every single Labour MP before us, we could go through them one by one and find out which have been using zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
I will give way in a second.
However, I think what we have safely also found out today is that the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North has much better powers of persuasion than the leader of his party. If only he were leader of his party the party might not be in the dire straits that it is in at the moment.
Grahame M. Morris
I am not admitting it; I absolutely do not use zero-hours contracts. I think part of the problem is that many local authorities do not have tight enough procedures with subcontractors; I would encourage them so to do. The point I wanted to make is this: is not what we are all concerned about in-work poverty and the 59% increase in such in-work poverty?
Philip Davies
I am grateful. We have had a second Labour view. I think, if I heard correctly, the hon. Gentleman said that he does not employ anybody on a zero-hours contract. That is two down—plenty more to go.
Ian Mearns
I am aware that colleagues from all parties occasionally employ people on a task-and-finish basis—a fixed fee for doing a particular task, using the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority payments system. That may have been interpreted by the Daily Mail as employing people on zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
We are getting nearer. I fear that if we go much further, we will get a full confession at some point.
Ian Lavery
This is a really serious debate, but we seem to be trivialising it, suggesting that the problem is perhaps the fault of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. The hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) hit the nail on the head. I think it was in 2000 that only 200,000 people in this country were on zero-hours contracts. As we sit in the Chamber today, there are 1.4 million people on zero-hours contracts. That is the real problem. I stand for the total abolition of zero-hours contracts for every single person, regardless of where they work.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. There is a certain amount of dispute over the actual number of people who are on zero-hours contracts. The labour force survey, which collects data on individual workers, not on the number of contracts, and asks employees and not workers for the information, has an estimate for the fourth quarter of 2013 of 583,000 people on zero-hours contracts. There is clearly a dispute over the figures. I am not necessarily saying that the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends are wrong in their figures; they have obviously sourced those figures from somewhere. Those who compile the labour force survey have different figures.
I genuinely do not understand the hon. Gentleman’s logic. He seems to be saying that it is absolutely fine for 200,000 people to be on zero-hours contracts, but that it is an absolute scandal for 1.4 million people to be on those contracts. Either zero-hours contracts are a good thing or they are a bad thing. Surely it cannot be a question of, “Because there were only 200,000 people on zero-hours contracts when Labour was in office, that was fine; that was a reason to do absolutely nothing about it and bury our heads in the sand, but now there are a few more of them, it is a massive scandal and we need to do something about it.” Either zero-hours contracts are right or they are wrong. The number of people who are on them cannot be the determining factor.
Sheila Gilmore
The public might be interested to know whether the hon. Gentleman favours or opposes zero-hours contracts. Throughout everything he has said, he has not made that clear. Since he is attempting to criticise certain councils, that might mean that he is against zero-hours contracts. Perhaps he would like to support the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) today?
Philip Davies
If Labour Members were not so enthusiastic in standing up to admit whether they employ anyone on a zero-hours contract or otherwise, I might get around to starting my speech. If I were able to do so, we might get into the nitty-gritty of the debate, but I am afraid that all of my time thus far has been taken up in dealing with excitable Labour Members which means that we cannot have the debate that the hon. Lady wants.
Graeme Morrice
I just want to follow up on the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore). I appreciate that we only have about five minutes left and I know that the hon. Gentleman has said that he has yet to start his speech, but perhaps to save a bit of time he could tell us whether he is in favour of zero-hours contracts or not. If he is not, will he give me an indication of whether he will support the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns)?
Philip Davies
I would like to think that I made it clear at the start of my speech that I do not support the Bill. For many workers, particularly students, zero-hours contracts are a good thing. They suit their patterns, they help them and they are a good way into the employment market. It suits their lifestyle to have zero-hours contracts. Some people have zero-hours contracts through choice; they are not all awful. I do not want to ban something that many people have by choice. So no, I do not agree with the Bill.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. When is he going to get on to that part of the Bill that makes it clear that those proposing it are not against zero-hours contracts completely and do not wish to outlaw them? They just wish to limit them, yet all their rhetoric has been about outlawing zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point and I would have liked to have humoured him by going through all this in as much detail as he would want, but it appears that time is against us. He is right to draw attention to the fact that once again—the situation is very similar to the previous debate—the Labour party is trying to give an impression to its voters, perhaps running scared of UKIP in its constituencies, that its Members believe in something. Yet the Bill proposed is nothing like the rhetoric that accompanies it.
The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Does my hon. Friend agree that one can always make improvements to zero-hours contracts? This is the first Government to have consulted on zero- hours contracts, we have got rid of the exclusivity clauses and we are bringing in transparency to ensure that people know they are on zero-hours contracts.
Philip Davies
I have no doubt that the Government are moving towards the Labour party on this issue; they tend to move towards the Labour party on most issues. The Minister’s confirmation of that fact comes as no surprise to me and I do not think it will come as much of a surprise to anybody.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman was complaining about the direction in which his party is moving, so I wondered in which party’s direction he was moving.
Philip Davies
I am not moving in any direction. As I have for the past 10 years, I am staying where I am in every possible regard. I do not move my views and policies based on what the latest opinion poll says or what the other parties might say. If there is one thing the people might be able to agree about it is that I stick to what I believe in, no matter how popular or unpopular it is or whatever the passing trend or fad. I stick up for what I believe in, which is something I have in common with the hon. Member for Gateshead. He does much the same.
In the limited time left, I want to pick up on one more point. It was unfortunate, as I do not think the hon. Gentleman intended to say this, but he seemed to indicate that zero-hours contracts were linked to quality of care.
Philip Davies
He is nodding in agreement. I think that is unfair on those people who work in the care sector on zero-hours contracts. There is no evidence that they give any worse care than other people—
Business without Debate
Hon. Members
Object.
Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 27 February 2015.
Carers Bedroom Entitlement (Social Housing Sector) Bill
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Hon. Members
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Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 9 January 2015.
Armed Forces (Prevention of Discrimination) (No. 2) Bill
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Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 5 December.
Road Traffic Regulation (Temporary Closure for Filming) Bill
Resumption of adjourned debate on Question (7 November), That the Bill be now read a Second time.
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Debate to be resumed on Friday 28 November.
Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill
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House of Lords (Maximum Membership) Bill
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Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 November.
EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill
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Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 November.
Wild Animals in Circuses Bill
Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
A1(M) (Hertfordshire)
(10 years ago)
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Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)
I am glad to have the opportunity to raise the issue of Hertfordshire’s roads and the widening of the A1(M), which is an important concern for my constituents, Hertfordshire and the UK economy.
Each morning and evening on the A1(M), between Welwyn Garden City and Stevenage, there are long tailbacks, and this bottleneck is affecting several constituencies and our national infrastructure. I am grateful to the Minister of State, Department for Transport, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), the trunk roads Minister, for agreeing to meet me, along with my right hon. Friends the Members for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) and for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), to discuss in more detail what improvements might be possible.
Given that the Minister agreed to this meeting, it might be helpful if I set out some of the main concerns. Hertfordshire is one of the most productive of revenue-raising counties in the country. Its geographical location and the nature of its economy make it suited to sustainable business growth. It has world-beating industry, such as Johnson Matthey in Royston, and major companies, such as MBDA and GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. Watford is a business success and the county is a centre for the cultural industries: it is home to Elstree studios, and many film and television programmes are shot on location in the county. Letchworth garden city, in my constituency, has an innovative Da Vinci school specialising in training young people, from 14 to 19, in cultural industry skills.
The Hertfordshire local enterprise partnership makes it clear that congestion is a key issue for businesses and residents and that addressing the issue will be instrumental in accommodating further growth in the county. The LEP believes that increased capacity on the A1(M) is the No. 1 priority for the county’s road network between 2015 and 2020. Our strong local science base has huge potential for further growth. Some 861 hectares of employment land are accessed from the A1(M), and the area employs 200,000 people, with 60,000 commuting in. Many homes are due to be built in the corridor over the next 20 years. By 2017, that section of the A1(M) will be under even greater stress and will struggle to accommodate any growth in the corridor without additional capacity.
Hertfordshire can be accessed easily from London and the midlands. It is convenient for the east coast ports and it has five railways and main roads—the A1(M), the A5, the A6, the A41, the M1, the M11 and the M25—that provide access to the rest of the country. We also have two airports, at Luton and Stansted, on the borders of the county, which open it up to the rest of Europe. This successful part of the country needs a well-functioning and well-funded transport infrastructure. Although much of our infrastructure is good, there are instances where we are let down. I would like to elaborate on three of them and consider the widening of the A1(M) a little later.
I held an Adjournment debate on the subject of roads of Hertfordshire in 1998, in which I called for three bypasses in my constituency: one for Baldock, one for Wadesmill to Puckeridge, and one around Royston. I can report that two have been built, which is a substantial investment, but not the one for Royston. There has long been a bypass to the north of the town, diverting the east-west A505 around it. However, the north-south A10 still goes right through the town centre. In the 17 years since I first called for a bypass on the A10, the situation has, if anything, worsened. The joint success of London, Hertfordshire, the midlands and Cambridgeshire, and a natural growth in the town’s population has put even more pressure on our road networks. Royston’s problems are becoming more serious, with heavy traffic streams through the town on a daily basis, tailbacks and road congestion clogging up Melbourn road, which affects children attending the main schools located on the other side of the A10.
Both the town council and local county councillors are united behind a plan to improve the situation with a bypass. In 1994, the Highways Agency announced that it supported the construction of an A10 bypass at Royston and the then Minister pledged to keep the case under review. I think you would agree, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it is a long review. Royston remains the only town on the A10 between London and King’s Lynn without a bypass. In my view the case is a strong one. I wonder whether the Minister would write to me about how best to make progress on that.
We have been fortunate locally in recently gaining funding from Government for a bypass on the A120 around Little Hadham and improvements to the A602, both in my constituency. The county council is consulting on the detail of those schemes, but given the strategic importance of the link between the A10 and the A120 in relation to Stansted airport and travel on the A120 east of Bishop’s Stortford, I would be grateful if the Department started to consider how best to improve the route further. I would argue that a Standon bypass is needed to complement the works that have already been agreed.
I should like now to turn to issues surrounding the widening of the A1(M). I have described the huge value of Hertfordshire in terms of its businesses and local enterprise. From our multinational corporations to our small and medium-sized enterprises, at all levels of the supply chain our businesses are successful. UK Trade & Investment says that inward investment to Hertfordshire shows a 61% increase in the last year. Members of Hertfordshire chamber of commerce tell us that the pool of skills comes not just from local residents. Major companies such GSK and Airbus, although based in north Hertfordshire, cast a wide net for employment. Those commuters must be catered for on our roads. The road network is not as strong as it should be, so some of Hertfordshire’s potential is not being realised.
One of the most important of those roads is the A1(M). Starting in London, it moves into Hertfordshire, servicing Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage and Letchworth in my constituency, and then goes on to Peterborough, Doncaster, Leeds and finally Edinburgh. The road is important in getting workers to work and also products out to the UK market and beyond. London and Edinburgh are extremely important in that, and recent announcements by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor about the creation of a northern hub will make the A1 even more significant. The section between Welwyn and Huntingdon needs further improvement. The road is not as good as it should be. The section of the A1(M) between Stevenage and Welwyn is important, but it is composed of only two lanes in each carriageway. Every morning and evening, the road is congested and tailbacks are long, as the road narrows for that section.
I recently received a letter from a constituent in Letchworth, explaining that these problems had lasted for 25 years. He said:
“During that time I have travelled up and down the AIM between Letchworth gate and the clock roundabout at Welwyn and ended up going into work before 7 and coming home after 7 in the evening to miss the jams on the AIM. Even when I was travelling 25 years ago the bottleneck of the dual carriageway motorway from the Corey’s Mill roundabout at the Hitchin Junction and the clock roundabout is a crawl that adds considerably to travel time, pollution and frustration…Even today when I travel to Heathrow or Gatwick airport you either have to travel at 5 in the morning or the day before and the cost of a hotel because of the bottleneck. Successive governments have failed…on upgrading the road to 3 lanes in each direction.”
Junction 7 at Stevenage connects one of the biggest industrial areas in Hertfordshire with the rest of the UK, but drivers see regular queues on the motorway and some members of the Herts chamber of commerce suggest that continued non-remedied access to Stevenage could prompt them to relocate. We cannot let this happen. At the other end of the two-lane section, Welwyn Garden City junction 6 is dead-centre of the so-called golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London. The problems here are a blight on one of the powerhouses of the UK economy.
Some changes to the slip road at junction 6 have been suggested, but there is confusion locally about the announced managed motorway solution. At first, it spoke of use of the hard shoulder to add capacity, but that was then rejected by the Department for Transport. One of the best and simplest things that could be done is the widening of this section of the A1(M) to three lanes on each carriageway. This would allow for a greater stream of traffic, it would ease congestion and enable an important national connection to flow more freely. Businesses would be helped, things would be made easier for commuters, less time would be spent in traffic jams and it would reduce pollution.
Hertfordshire is a strong contributor to the UK and to public spending across the country. Hertfordshire contributes £12 billion in tax revenues each year and receives £8 billion in public expenditure—meaning that the county’s net contribution is £4 billion a year. My constituents feel that some of these public funds should be used in Hertfordshire to sort out the problems I have outlined.
I look forward to meeting the trunk roads Minister with my colleagues. I hope that the Minister responding today will be able at least to acknowledge the importance of the Hertfordshire economy and the need for a good strong infrastructure to support it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Robert Goodwill)
I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertshire (Sir Oliver Heald) on securing this debate on future strategic improvements to the A1(M). The great north road is a very important trunk road for this country, and coming from the great north myself I understand its importance. Indeed, much has already been done on the A1, as many sections have been upgraded to motorway standard, and we look forward to further investment in this very important route in the future.
I know that my hon. and learned Friend has been supporting his constituents, local businesses and the local economy by pursuing improvements to the A1(M) to unlock potential growth in Hertfordshire throughout the year. I applaud his engagement with the A1(M) consortium and would hold up this cross-organisational body as a good example of a constructive approach to stimulating debate and developing consensus on the way forward for Hertfordshire.
Before I passed over responsibility for strategic roads to the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), I took a particular interest in the issue of the A1(M) in Hertfordshire, meeting both my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) and the editor of the Welwyn Hatfield Times to discuss future improvements to this road. At those meetings, I made it clear that my Department would give serious consideration to this issue, together with taking early action to address pinch points.
I also know that my hon. and learned Friend expects to bring a number of MPs from across Hertfordshire to a meeting with my right hon. Friend the Minister of State who is responsible for strategic roads in order to set out the case for widening the A1(M) from the M25 to Letchworth before the autumn statement.
Before I respond to the points raised by my hon. and learned Friend, it is perhaps worth taking the opportunity to set out this Government’s position on investment in the strategic road network and the history of proposals for major improvements to the A1(M), as well as setting out how my Department will consider options for future major investments.
The strategic road network is the Government’s largest single asset, currently valued at about £100 billion and comprising approximately 4,350 miles of motorways and all-purpose trunk roads. The Government recognise the importance of transport infrastructure to support the economy, and we have already announced increased Government funding to deliver improvements targeted at supporting economic growth. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor made clear our commitment to deliver a step change in investment in transport infrastructure in his statement on 26 June 2013, when he announced the conclusions of the Government’s spending review of that year.
The Treasury’s Command Paper “Investing in Britain’s future” said that the Government would invest more than £28 billion in enhancements to, and maintenance of, national and local roads, and confirmed that we would provide funding for the building of a number of Highways Agency major road projects to tackle the most congested parts of the network, subject to value for money and deliverability.
On current investment in the strategic road network in Hertfordshire, smart motorway systems are now in operation between junctions 23 and 27 of the M25. Smart motorways help to relieve congestion by using technology to vary speed limits, and they also allow the hard shoulder to be allowed as a running lane to create additional capacity. They deliver those benefits at a significantly lower cost than conventional motorway widening, and with less impact on the environment during construction. The project is already relieving congestion and smoothing the flow of traffic, which is improving safety and journey times. Those benefits are also supporting economic development in the region.
The pinch point programme forms part of the UK Government’s growth initiative, which was outlined in the autumn statement in November 2011. That was followed up with the allocation of further funding in the 2012 autumn statement. The Highways Agency has designed the programme to deliver smaller-scale improvements to the strategic road network that will help to stimulate growth in the local economy, relieve congestion and improve safety.
More than £2 million of funding has been allocated to improving junction 6 of the A1(M) at Welwyn. The key features of the scheme include amending the current road layout to provide a lane drop at junction 6 and extending and amending the existing layout of the junction 6 entry slip road. That will improve traffic flow on the A1(M) northbound carriageway, with the amended entry slip road layout providing additional distance for traffic joining the A1(M) to merge safely with the main line of traffic. Work on the scheme will start in December and is due to be completed in April 2015.
In addition, £5.6 million has been committed to the A1 Black Cat roundabout improvements at Chawston. Although that is in Bedfordshire, that scheme will have a positive impact on the effectiveness of the A1(M) in Hertfordshire. It will reduce congestion by widening the roundabout and the A1 approach roads, and by providing 24-hour signals at the points at which the A1 meets the roundabout. It is predicted that the proposed scheme will reduce congestion, improve journey time reliability, improve safety and reduce carbon emissions. Work began in June and is due to be completed in early 2015.
In July, the Government announced a series of growth deals with businesses and local authorities across England through the local growth fund. The Hertfordshire local enterprise partnership has secured £199.2 million from the fund to support strategic development, relieve congestion and reduce journey times across the Hertfordshire area. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire mentioned, the Hertfordshire local enterprise partnership has been successful in securing a substantial amount of funding through its local growth deal—in the region of £48 million—for the M11/A10 transport package, which includes Little Hadham bypass, upgrades to the network to improve the resilience of the A10 and improvements on the A602 around Stevenage. Further priorities for improvements to the local transport network will be for the Hertfordshire local enterprise partnership to identify for future rounds of the local growth fund.
As my hon. and learned Friend will know, the Hertfordshire growth deal reflects the importance of the A1(M) for local growth ambitions, with £3.8 million being invested in transport improvements through the A1(M) transport package, and £16 million being invested in the A1(M) growth area forum to help facilitate developments around Stevenage. The package also includes a number of sustainable transport measures to provide more realistic alternatives for local trips, including the A1 sustainable transport package, the A602 local congestion measures and Buslink 2016. The M11/A10 transport package attracted £48.4 million of local growth fund money for a package of schemes including station access improvements, upgrades to the network to improve resilience, the Little Hadham bypass, A602 improvements and A10 network resilience.
The M1/M25 transport package has £15 million of local growth fund finance for a package of transport schemes including A414 junction improvements, Hemel Hempstead station forecourt enhancements, and Watford business park pedestrian and cycle access enhancements. Hertfordshire county council’s BigHertsBigIdeas project is a package of measures designed to address congestion and regeneration needs in Watford, Hemel Hempstead and St Albans. That includes cycling provision, public transport improvements and electric vehicle charging. The county council has secured a total of £11.69 million from the Department for the project through the local sustainable transport fund.
Hertfordshire county council continues to receive high levels of maintenance and integrated transport block funding. It was also allocated an additional £3.621 million from the March 2014 weather repair fund, and £2.191 million from the June 2014 pothole funding allocation to help to deal with all the potholes that appeared during the bad weather. I suspect that some of the potholes were there before the bad weather started, but they still need to be dealt with.
As for the Government’s future investment planning processes, my hon. and learned Friend will know that the Highways Agency is currently conducting its route strategy process, and that the Government recently concluded the growth deal process with all local enterprise partnerships. Earlier in the year, John Gourd, the chair of Hertfordshire local enterprise partnership, met officials from the Department and the Highways Agency to discuss the Department’s future investment planning processes, including the route strategy process. The strategies that are being developed by the Highways Agency will establish outline operational and investment priorities for all routes on the strategic road network—including the London to Leeds (East) route strategy, which encompasses the A1(M)—for the period up to March 2021, and will give an indication of the priorities beyond that.
Last autumn local enterprise partnerships, local authorities and other interested groups were invited to contribute to discussions about the current and future performance of the strategic road network to help to identify local priorities, and the evidence report has subsequently been published. It acknowledges the issues that exist on the A1(M) in Hertfordshire and the fact that, as we heard from my hon. and learned Friend, there is planned development and growth in the surrounding area. The Highways Agency and the Department used the evidence to identify priority locations for possible future investment in the strategic road network, and have started a programme of studies at those locations. Proposals emerging from those preliminary studies will be considered by my Department in the lead-up to the autumn statement—which, confusingly, will be presented in December this year—and will help to inform the Department’s road investment strategy, which we aim to complete before the end of the year. The route strategy work is due to be completed by the end of March 2015.
I note that the A1 corridor consortium is already working with the Highways Agency and other parties to develop a strategy to address congestion and future capacity issues on the A1(M), and I encourage the consortium to continue to work with the agency as the route strategy process develops.
I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend on his tenacity in campaigning for investment in transport infrastructure in Hertfordshire over a number of years. I fully recognise the importance of the A1(M) to him and his constituents. I have made it clear that the Government are committed to, and have set out, plans for large-scale investments to improve our national strategic road network in the relatively short term. We are also committed to maintaining a pipeline of future longer-term investments. Indeed, we are tripling the budget that was delivered by the last Government—if “delivered” is a word that can be used to describe that paltry investment.
In considering the choices to be made in relation to future investments in the strategic road network, my Department and I, and the Highways Agency, will work closely with local stakeholders through the route strategy process, to ensure that not just future transport problems but the range of possible solutions are considered. As I have said, it is important that proposals for future investment are clearly supported by local stakeholders, and that there is a clear consensus on what is required. Ultimately, any proposals for future investment need to be able to demonstrate a strong business, and the delivery of both transport and wider economic benefits.
We are also committed to working with local partners, including local authorities and local enterprise partnerships, on considering proposals for improvements that are affordable and clearly supported by local and regional stakeholders. In that way, we can place ourselves in a strong position to make the best use of the available funds and to establish a sound base for the development of a transport system that can contribute to a low-carbon economy and to our long-term economic plan.
Question put and agreed to.