Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Wheeler and Lord Sharkey

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheeler (Lab)]

My Lords, with 6 million people in England waiting for operations and routine procedures, many of whom are in pain, I make no apology for moving my amendment at the start of this grouping, which seeks to ensure that the 18-week waiting time target is maintained as a key part of the NHS mandate. This group also covers key amendments on the commissioning role of integrated care boards in relation to specialised healthcare services, and on the duty of ICBs to share best practice on innovation and the quality of services.

On waiting lists, the pandemic has resulted in a huge backlog of care and treatment, compounding pre-existing challenges. The 18-week waiting time standard has not been met by the NHS since 2016. Instead, we have a situation where the NHS’s latest planning guidance sets out plans to eliminate only waits of 104 weeks, to reduce waits of 78 weeks and to support an overall reduction in 52-week waits. Even as a temporary measure this should be unacceptable, and at best we should have a commitment and a plan to restore performance.

Last week’s report from the Health and Social Care Select Committee described the unquantifiable challenge faced by the NHS in addressing the backlog, with 300,000 people now waiting for more than a year for treatment for surgery, such as hip or knee replacements. We know the devastating suffering that the long delays in diagnosing cancer and other diseases such as heart conditions or stroke are causing. The Secretary of State himself said that the waiting list might grow to 13 million, and that was before the current omicron wave, which has only exacerbated this challenge. His promise in November to publish the Government’s plans to meet the workforce requirements needed to address staff shortages and the record waiting lists has yet to materialise.

Of course, this is not just about elective care. In emergency departments, waiting lines in October 2021 were the worst since records began, with one in four patients waiting longer than four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged, and with trolley waits at a record high. October last year saw the highest number of 999 calls on record. There is a serious risk that the ongoing crisis in emergency care could derail the elective recovery programme.

Although the problems are manifold, prioritisation of the elective backlog is understandable. However, a focus on those areas most amenable to numerical task risk effectively deprioritises other equally important areas such as primary care, community services and mental health services, which all play a crucial role in keeping people healthy and out of hospital. It would be helpful if the plans around recovery in other aspects of care, with some sort of target or at least objective spelled out, were also made known—access to GPs being a primary example.

We know that workforce shortages are the key limiting factor on success in tackling the backlog. Without better short and long-term workforce planning, the 9 million additional checks, tests and treatments will not be deliverable. NHS England’s chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, told the Select Committee that the NHS currently has 93,000 vacancies for NHS positions and shortages in nearly every speciality. The social care workforce has, at present, 105,000 vacancies and a turnover rate of 28.5%, rising to 38.2% for nurses working in social care. Changing the way the cap is calculated will not help this, and of course discussions on both the cap and the need for a credible and systematic workforce plan in the light of the current chronic staff shortages will follow later in the Bill.

The waiting times focus of my amendment, which seeks to insert a new paragraph into Clause 3(2), is tangible and measurable, as are the constitutional targets. In the context of the huge challenges the NHS faces, the 18-week waiting time target remains vital. The discipline it imposes helps focus the entire system on the needs of patients. It drives behaviour and focuses funding, and it facilitates the organisation of seamless care for the patient, from the GP practice through diagnostic tests, out-patient care and, ultimately, if needed, to in-patient treatment. It gives leaders at local level in particular the leverage they need to unblock barriers to speedy care, such as delayed discharges from the hospital—another key issue on which we will focus later in the Bill.

The second part of my amendment reinforces the importance of the target for care for people with rare conditions and mental health conditions, which can all too often be Cinderella areas—overlooked in favour of more common conditions. I have a personal interest, which I declare, as vice-chair of the Specialised Healthcare Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 patient-related charities, groups and corporate supporters campaigning for improvements to care for patients with rare and specialised conditions, and for greater awareness of their needs, treatment and support.

The amendment also underlines the need for speedy diagnosis for this key group of patients. The SHCA chair, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, has added his name to my amendment and will speak on the importance of this in his contribution. He will also speak to Amendment 19 in this group, to which I have also added my name, which would ensure that ICBs

“commission specialised services in line with national standards”,

that their performance in this regard is published and monitored, and that there are safeguards that will operate if this commissioning role is removed from an ICB.

On treatment standards, can the Minister reaffirm that despite the current situation, every patient legally retains the right to treatment within 18 weeks? If so, what steps can patients take if the NHS does not deliver in line with this requirement? Can he assure the House that the Government have no plans to weaken this legal right and are fully committed to returning the NHS to an 18-week standard?

I am also speaking to Amendment 60 from my noble friend Lady Thornton, which would insert a new subsection, within the proposed new sections in Clause 20 on ICBs, to ensure that innovation and best practice on the quality of services

“is shared … openly and prevents individual trusts and foundation trusts from refusing to share beneficial developments or improvements through any issues around competition between organisations.”

This is crucial in helping to overcome any obstacles linked to the autonomy or independence of the organisations evolved.

We also support Amendment 215 from my noble friend Lady Merron, which would insert an important new clause after Clause 80, requiring the Secretary of State to publish an annual report to Parliament

“on waiting times for treatment in England, including disparities”

across the country. It is vital that this report also details the steps taken to ensure that patients, in line with their rights under the NHS constitution, are able to access services within minimum waiting times.

We also note Amendment 21 from my noble friend Lord Davies. He will be fully aware of Labour’s support in commissioning from the NHS as the preferred provider. His amendment is borne out of the right motivations but, I am afraid, misses the point that there are many social enterprises, charities and community organisations whose delivery of healthcare is vital to the functioning of the NHS and social care—for example, in end-of-life care—and we fully support the key role that they play.

The situation facing the NHS as it struggles to address waiting times and lists is dire, yet the recent NAO report on waiting times recovery pointed to some reasonable projections indicating that, far from improving on the current trajectory, the position will be even worse in March 2025 and beyond. That takes into account all the Government’s promised funding. The situation has echoes of the 1990s; Labour was able to address the challenges then, under different circumstances, but the current challenges are even harder. By 2010, the situation had improved to such an extent that demand for private healthcare had dropped. Now we see the opposite, with people having to pay to jump the queues.

Targets were an important part of how improvement was achieved through Labour’s three terms, backed by greater investment and a genuine commitment to public service solutions. The NHS responded to the confidence placed in it but today, there is no plan and no commitment, and totally inadequate funding to address the waiting times issue—the issue that patients are usually most concerned about. The NHS Mandate and the NHS constitution contain crucial rights and standards of care for patients and stakeholders, ensuring that the NHS has basic stability, knows what is expected of it and can be judged on its performance. We must keep the 18-week target and make sure that it is not fudged away. I beg to move.

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Specialised Healthcare Alliance. I will speak to Amendment 6 and 19. I added my name to Amendment 6 and I wholeheartedly support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, in her eloquent opening remarks. I will make a few brief supplementary points on rare and less common diseases.

Proposed new subsection (2A)(b) in Amendment 6 refers to waiting times for a rare disease diagnosis and is intended to probe the Government’s ambitions in this area. The Government’s rare disease framework noted that it can take years to receive a final and definitive diagnosis of a rare disease and that some people living with a rare condition may never receive one at all.

In 2019, the Government’s national conversation on rare diseases found, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, that getting the diagnosis right was the number one challenge in rare disease care. But the process of getting this diagnosis has been called, entirely understandably, an odyssey—many journeys, many ports of call, and many difficulties. This odyssey frequently involves multiple referrals, inconclusive tests and even incorrect diagnoses before a final definitive diagnosis is arrived at.

The rare disease framework makes a very welcome commitment to making improvements in this journey. I would be grateful if the Minister could say what concrete steps are being taken to bring about the desired improvements to arrive at Ithaca much earlier and in better shape. For example, the rare disease framework talks of a need to improve diagnosis rates. How is this to be measured and what is the baseline to be? Is there a target that the Government are working towards? If there is, when is it expected to be reached? The framework also commits to making use of advanced diagnostics to improve the speed of diagnosis. Can the Minister say what new technologies are being deployed and which are under active consideration? Finally, the spending review announced funds for a new newborn genetic screening programme. What might we expect in terms of a timeline for the piloting of this programme and its wider implementation if the benefits are proven?

I turn to Amendment 19, in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for whose support I am grateful. We have around 3.5 million people with rare or less common diseases or complex conditions. This number grows as our population ages. Many of these people require specialised treatment of one kind or another. Currently, these treatments are provided by the specialised commissioning team of NHS England. In total, there are 149 specialised services directly commissioned by NHS England, and in 2018-19 £18 billion or so was spent on these services.

There are some problematical aspects to the large-scale direct national commissioning of this very large range of specialised services. The NHS points to these in its paper of last January, Integrating Care: Next Steps to Building Strong and Effective Integrated Care Systems across England. It said that

“these national commissioning arrangements can sometimes mean fragmented care pathways, misaligned incentives and missed opportunities for upstream investment and preventative intervention.”

The paper goes on to propose a new model whereby the provision of some specialised services can be delegated to be more responsive to place-based needs and local collaborations.

The NHS proposes that there will be four principles underlying this new approach to the delivery of specialised services. The first is that all specialised services will continue to be subject to consistent national service specifications and evidence-based policies determining treatment eligibility. The second is that strategic commissioning, decision-making and accountability for specialised services will be led and integrated at the appropriate population level. The third is that clinical networks and provider collaborations will drive improvement, service change and transformation across specialised and non-specialised services. The fourth is that funding of specialised services will shift from provider-based allocations to population-based budgets, supporting the connection of services back to base.

Amendment 19 is a probing amendment to allow us to ask a few detailed questions about how these principles will operate in practice. The first is to do with the ability of ICBs to commission specialised services in line with ongoing national standards. How will this ability be assessed, and by whom? Can the Minister confirm that being judged to have the appropriate ability will be a transparent decision and an absolute condition of delegation? Following this, can the Minister also confirm that there will be at least an annual published review of ICBs’ performance in the commissioning of these specialised services? Can the Minister tell us what the circumstances are in which such a delegation of specialised commissioning may be withdrawn? What is the legal mechanism for doing that? Finally, there is the question of money. How can we be sure that the appropriate funds are spent by ICBs on specialised commissioning? Is a ring-fencing of funds being considered, for example?

I close by noting the many successes of the NHS specialised commissioning group and its frequent and very welcome engagement with patient groups and the Specialised Healthcare Alliance.