Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Lords Chamber

I would like to know from the Government the explanation for treating education and training as an afterthought. Perhaps I will have the answer from the Liberal Democrat Benches straight away.

[Baroness Tonge]

I do not have an answer for the noble Lord, but I am as horrified as he is that education and training were not in the Bill from the beginning. I had not noticed that the words were not there and I was incredulous when I saw the amendment. I could not believe it. Would he agree that it would be better, in case there are other huge omissions that at this late stage we have still not spotted, if the Bill were withdrawn immediately and rethought?

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I certainly agree with the noble Baroness on that. If I have to speculate again, the only hypothesis that I can credibly come up with is that the education and training requirement was not initially in the Bill because the whole thing is a hurried, makeshift, politically driven, ill thought through and frankly almost frivolous exercise—an appalling way to treat a great national institution of which we are all so proud.

I return to the publication of the White Paper in 1944, to which the noble Lord, Lord Walton, referred. He even lobbied the Minister at the time, Mr Willink. It was before I was born and it is wonderful to see the noble Lord in such great form all these years later, defending the NHS. It was an all-party achievement. I am afraid that the Conservative Party in its modern form no longer has the deep commitment to what many of us feel is a matter of national consensus that we hope will continue.

I repeat that this is in no way a personal attack on the Minister: far from it. He did everything that he could to remedy the situation. However, the Government right through the election campaign were against any kind of top-down reorganisation of the health service. They come out with a half-baked Bill, are immediately attacked from many sides and make concessions. People continually run to David Nicholson and say, “You’d better redraft this or that, we haven't thought about this, we have a problem here, what do we do about this?”. David Nicholson dashes off something on a piece of paper and we get another amendment. It is not the way to legislate on any serious matter. It is certainly a lamentable way to legislate on our great National Health Service.