Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015
Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Warner(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I was not planning to speak today, but I have to rise to respond to the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland. If we were to have a logical system in this country for dealing with drugs, tobacco would indeed be illegal. We have lots of drugs that are illegal in this country that are infinitely safer than tobacco, and we all know that, if we were starting today, tobacco would be unlawful. So I simply do not accept the point that, simply because tobacco is lawful, we should allow the market to let rip—very far from it. We know that it is very difficult to make a product such as tobacco unlawful at this stage, but we need to do everything possible to protect the public from the most dangerous drug available in this country today.
Care Bill [HL]
Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Warner(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Warner (Lab)
My Lords, although I am Lord Warner of Brockley in the London Borough of Lewisham, I do not intend to speak about the Lewisham case.
I am conscious that this is a topic which can rapidly cause eyes to glaze over as we go into some of the processes involved here. At the heart of this there is a fundamental problem which is much deeper and more serious than when the 2006 Act was passed. That was seven years ago. This procedure of trust special administrators was set up to deal with a relatively small number of cases that might come along. It was not a system set up to deal with major overhauls of acute hospitals up and down the country.
We are now in a very different financial situation from when this earlier legislation was going through Parliament. You pays your money and you takes your choice as to who you believe about the black hole that there will be in the NHS finances at the end of this decade. If you want to believe Sir David Nicholson, the outgoing chief executive of NHS England, it will be £30 billion. A number of noble Lords may be shaking their heads because they do not wish to believe him, but he says £30 billion. If you want to believe the Nuffield Trust, it will be somewhere north of £40 billion. If you want to consider the more measured estimate last week from the chief executive of Monitor, it will be £12 billion, but that assumes a level of efficiency savings which seem somewhat like fantasy football in terms of their deliverability. It is likely to be a lot more than £12 billion.
These are numbers which no one was even thinking about when the trust special administrator system was set up. I have some sympathy with the Government’s position because there is no doubt that we have a large and growing number of clinically and financially unsustainable acute trusts. The Government have a real problem that they are trying to tackle. However, I suggest that this particular way of tackling it is not the best way, because it is trying to adapt a system which was produced for a relatively small number of cases into a whole system set of arrangements. It has some curious quirks. It seems to treat clinical commissioning groups which are commissioning from foundation trusts differently from those commissioning from non-foundation trusts. I am not going to risk eyes glazing over by talking about this, but this set of proposals does not seem to treat different clinical commissioning groups in exactly the same way.
We must also start to engage the public in the scale of changes that will have to be made to the NHS in order to make it sustainable. It is not just that black hole issue; it is the clinical sustainability of some of its services. We are already finding difficulty in staffing A&E departments. There is a set of issues around whether the manpower would be sufficient to enable us to keep 24/7 acute specialist services on the same number of sites. I would suggest to the Minister as humbly as I can that you are not going to deal with the scale of the problem with this set of arrangements. For the sorts of reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, set out, even if you have this set of arrangements on the statute book, you are going to end up with many cases of Lewisham hospital writ large, dotted around the country. There is nothing in these provisions which really ensures that the wider public debate about the reshaping of these services takes place. They are a recipe for a very large number of one-off local rows on a major scale. The lawyers in this House must be rubbing their hands at the prospect of judicial review because a very likely outcome of all this is a large number of contested claims about the way the exercise has been done. There simply will not be the political cover for TSAs to be bold in their thinking.
The noble Earl said we want them to be able to give very effective consideration to the solutions that are needed. I suggest that if you are a trust special administrator and you think you will be kicked from Land’s End to the north-east because of the controversy around the proposals, that is not likely to produce whole-system changes. We now have to think about reviewing whether the TSA system is fit for purpose and meets the needs of the circumstances we now face. That is why, although I am not normally in favour of wrecking amendments, I agree with my noble friend Lord Hunt’s idea that we should have a pause and think again about the best way to reconfigure hospital services so that politicians and the public can engage with this issue and have the kinds of public debates that we badly need to have if we are to maintain the NHS in anything like the form it is today.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, in part, I support the Minister because, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, the Government have a problem. We know that for many years there have been attempts to close hospitals that need to be closed and it can take 15 years for that to happen. If the Government can come forward with a sensible, reasonable way of making those decisions, I will back it all the way. However, I find myself agreeing with the idea that a rather quick fix designed to achieve some solution to the Lewisham problem is not the way to do it. This is a national problem of considerable significance. I ask the Minister to take this away, think hard about it and come back with a good set of proposals to help this country close hospitals when they need to be closed. I would certainly be there behind him.
Care Bill [HL]
Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Warner(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 123. In doing so, I add my support to Amendments 76 and 124, which were tabled by my noble friend Lady Greengross. Indeed, a few of my comments slightly overlap hers.
As the Bill stands, local authorities will be given many complex duties and will be required to make many decisions which will have a substantial—you could say devastating—impact on the lives of elderly and disabled people, but there is no statutory provision for any appeal or independent review process, even if decisions are made on the basis of factual or legal errors. That is the point of the comments I want to make.
I understand that the Government have committed themselves to consider a process of redress or appeal and that they recognised in their response to the Joint Committee that it is,
“vital that people have an effective way to complain and seek redress”,
but there is no assurance in the Bill that such a system will be put in place and, if one is, what its characteristics will be. As my noble friend Lady Greengross said, regulations under other legislation do not appear to do the job. I hope the Minister will comment on that situation.
For example, local authorities decide whether an elderly or disabled person should continue to receive care support. Many will lose that support as a result of cuts to local authority budgets. The impact of losing care support—an entire care package in some cases—can be catastrophic, according to Leonard Cheshire Disability and others directly in touch with disabled or elderly people. Many years ago, I worked with these people, and I find the very idea that a care package could simply be removed very frightening, even as an onlooker, let alone as somebody experiencing such a thing. People become trapped in their homes, unable to work and unable to get out. They become depressed and, in some cases, suicidal—and not surprisingly in my view. There can also be risks to people’s health. As they try to undertake tasks for which they are not well suited or which they are unable to perform on their own, they fall. Has anyone estimated the likely cost to the health service of increased falls, accidents and problems of this kind? What is the Government’s view of the economic costs to the country if family carers have to give up work in order to step into the breach when the state withdraws? The problem is that the local authority may save money but the DWP and the Treasury are likely to pick up the tab. I am not quite sure what the Minister in the other place would think about that.
It is easy for the state machinery to underestimate the incredible vulnerability of many elderly and disabled people. Applicants for care support will inevitably feel nervous and fearful of the consequences of upsetting the very people on whom they depend so heavily. It is terribly important that an appeal or review process is not only user-friendly and accessible but really is independent of the people making decisions about the person’s care. Can the Minister honestly say that care decisions will in future not vary across the country? Can he say that decisions will be made without error and always be based on the law? I do not think so. In preparing this amendment we have been mindful of the cost constraints and the need to allow Ministers flexibility to create a system that will be proportionate and sustainable. I hope the Minister will recognise this in his closing comments.
Having said that, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that Leonard Cheshire Disability has specifically asked me to ensure that a full tribunal service be considered, although we did have a discussion about the financial implications of that. It argues that if such a system exists to deal with conflicts about school places, a decision to deny social care is equally as devastating. The Law Commission recognised the importance of a fair, independent and accessible system of redress.
I know that the noble Earl has discussed this issue with key stakeholders and perfectly well understands the points I am making. I hope he can give the House an assurance today that, if he is unable to accept the precise wording of the amendment, the Government will table an amendment at Third Reading that will guarantee that a suitable appeal or review process will be in place when the Care Bill comes into effect.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I support these amendments—not necessarily the specific wording but the principles behind them. I remind the House of a real difference between many of the appeals under the new framework for adult care and support and what has gone before. We are now talking about a set of arrangements with considerable financial implications for people and their families. In the social security system we set up a tribunal system to arbitrate, which has worked pretty well for a long time. Many of these issues are more akin to the social security system than to complaints about process. There will be complaints about process but many of the things covered in these amendments are about a failure to get a resource from the public purse to which people think they are entitled and have evidence that they are. This is much more akin to the arrangements in the social security system for people who have their claims rejected. It is much nearer to that than complaints about poor processes of work by a public body. The Government should think long and hard about this issue because they are in grave danger of ending up with the whole system being overwhelmed by the number of complaints. Without a convincing system for resolving appeals in the framework of the Care Bill we are heading down a path where judicial review will start to feature quite strongly.
I remind the noble Earl of some of the other issues where there could be appeals. The Joint Committee looked at some of the friction points where there was scope for dispute. There is a raft of areas for dispute over assessment of carers and service users and a whole range of areas for dispute about ability and whether you are going to be charged or not. After the previous debate on deferred payment I can think of another fruitful area for complaints—an inability to get on to some kind of deferred payment scheme. Another area, important to patients and service users, is setting the price for contracts to providers. Clearly, the price-setting mechanism may be disputed between the providers of services who may claim that the price offered by the commissioning agent will be bad for service users and patients. I am not suggesting that these could all come together under one process, but we want more convincing architecture in this Bill to give confidence that there is a sensible way of resolving and arbitrating areas for dispute and for the service user and their carers to secure redress without going through an excessively complicated process.
National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) (No. 2) Regulations 2013
Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Warner(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Meacher
I would simply like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Warner, whether he has any interests in private sector provision and, if he does, whether he would like to declare them to this House.
Lord Warner
If the noble Baroness was listening, I think I declared my registered interests at the beginning of my utterances. She is very welcome to look at the register, which will show those particular interests, but they do not shape my view. I would like to finish the argument. If noble Lords want to go on interrupting me that is fine, but I would like to finish the arguments which substantially substantiate the case for accepting these regulations.
As I was saying before I was interrupted, these rules are very similar to the rules produced under the previous Labour Government but with the addition of some sensible provisions on integration. Let me remind colleagues that these regulations are totally compatible with the policy of using the independent sector in the NHS set out in the 2005 election manifesto of the Labour Party. Some may recall that Labour won a third election on the trot with that manifesto. I also remember, as a Minister, implementing the NHS parts of that manifesto with a policy of “any willing provider”. Many of the interests opposing these regulations look remarkably familiar to me from those days.
Even in the swashbuckling new Labour days of modest NHS competition, most PCTs’ contracts were rolled forward each year under that regime without any tendering process, competitive or otherwise. My guess would be that there were probably somewhere of the order of 50,000 of those contracts each year. It would have been totally impracticable and unnecessary to put many of those out to competitive tender each year, or even every three years. It will be the same with the 211 clinical commissioning groups. They will not be able to put out to tender on any great scale a large number of contracts, and they will be operating with a smaller number of staff than the PCTs.
The clinical commissioning groups will have to concentrate their change efforts on those services where there is continuing failure or underperformance, or where it is clear that there is a bigger prize of patient benefits from a major overhaul and out-tendering of services. I suggest that it is almost a paranoid fantasy to suggest that David Bennett and Co. at Monitor, with about 40 staff working on competition issues, will be able to act as a kind of Stasi outfit, rounding up clinical commissioning groups which have not recorded enough competitive tendering processes.
I am afraid that I have to disagree fundamentally with many of my colleagues. My sympathies are with the Minister over these regulations. He has done his best, in his customary patient way, to clarify them. In my view, they are perfectly acceptable in their present form and can always be amended in the light of experience. To my colleagues on these Benches, I would say that we ought to remember what was satisfying to the British public when we were winning elections. This approach of injecting, on an agreed basis, some measure of competition and change where NHS public providers are consistently failing is in the best interests of patients.