NHS: Five Year Forward View

Debate between Earl Howe and Lord Liddle

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is absolutely right. One of the critical elements of the Five Year Forward View is to ensure that we have the right number of staff with the right qualifications in the right places. While Health Education England is the body charged with ensuring that that happens, it is up to us in government to ensure that there is adequate funding to enable it to do that. I can assure my noble friend that Ministers are very clear that Health Education England should be fully supported to deliver the programme that it has mapped out for itself. That programme is an exciting one. It involves more doctors and nurses in training over the next few years. Our ambition is to see by 2020 an extra 10,000 people working in primary care, for example—and that is only one detail.

As a result of the Government’s reforms to the health service, we have been able to afford a large number of extra posts in front-line care, including doctors and nurses in both primary and secondary care. We have done that by reducing the number of administrators in the system—20,000 fewer than there were in 2010. My noble friend is right to draw attention to this issue; it is one that is very much in our focus.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, pursuing the point about the integration of health and social care—I declare an interest as a member of Cumbria County Council—we in Cumbria face a situation where already our budget has gone down by over £100 million, we face another £80-odd million of cuts in the next four years, and this does not take account of the cost of the tax reductions that the Conservative Party is promising. The numbers of staff will have declined by 2,500 from 2010 to 2017, out of a staff of about 8,000. In this situation, it is impossible to protect social care. It is interesting that the Government are promising a longer-term perspective on health funding. Does this perspective apply to social care funding as well? What guarantees are the Government able to give that they will continue to fund local councils adequately in order to meet the rapidly growing demands of social care?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a very good point. It is for precisely that reason that we have looked at the mechanism that we have called the Better Care Fund to bring together budgets for health and social care. It will amount in practice to a transfer of funding into social care from the NHS. We are clear that that is the best way in which we can realise the vision that we have set, which is a preventive one for people—in other words, to forestall admissions to hospital.

Local government is feeling the strain—I do not seek to deny that—but so are many other areas of our national life. Up to now, the Better Care Fund aside, we have found an extra £1.1 billion from the NHS budget to bolster local authority budgets, and we are maintaining public health allocations at the same figure as before, so no cuts there. I realise that the strains are considerable and that local authorities are having to find ingenious ways of moving forward, but I am encouraged by the Better Care Fund plans that are coming forward; they look credible and exciting in terms of the quality of care that local authorities are now looking at.