Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Lord Stevens of Birmingham

Lords Hansard - Part 3 & Committee stage
Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

I shall briefly make two points. First, having looked at this quite carefully, it is good to see that there is nothing in the proposals for the payment scheme that would intrinsically give rise to the concerns just articulated. Secondly, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, there are very good answers that can be provided, even if not now, to the questions that he poses. One starting point would be to look at the judgment that the Court of Appeal handed down at the end of 2018, which essentially confirmed that what he said is correct. It is just about possible to torture the 2012 tariff system to make it fit for purpose, but an incredibly elaborate set of workarounds is required to do so, with an enormous amount of bureaucracy and that covers only about 60% of the fund flows in the National Health Service. Hence the desire for something more flexible, which this set of clauses enables the NHS to take forward.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very gratifying that so many noble Lords have decided to come in to take part in a debate about NHS finances tonight; I am very grateful for that.

I shall speak briefly to Amendments 199, 200 and 202A in my name. Amendment 199 provides that the Secretary of State must set out rules for determining the price to be paid for NHS services. Amendment 200 ensures that the key policy documents covering NHS services are approved by the Secretary of State. Amendment 202A provides that the rules must be subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

I am very pleased that the complexity of NHS funding was not mentioned in great detail tonight, but there has been speculation about how funding may work and how the various financial responsibilities in and across ICSs may develop. What we think we know is that complex funding approaches, such as payment by results, will become less important. In Clause 70 and the associated Schedule 10, however, the Bill is wonderfully uninformative. It just says, “Out with the old”—the national tariff—“and in with the new”, the NHS payment scheme. I am again with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in saying that these questions need to be answered, because they will affect the regulations, procurement rules and so on.

The payment scheme—actually, I am not going to talk about the history of the NHS payment scheme at this time of night, but, unless the Minister can justify it and answer the questions posed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, this part of the Bill should be quietly dropped. We seem to have something that works, so why replace it with something that we do not know very much about?