Health and Care Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Jonathan Ashworth

2nd reading
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come to the financial flows in a few moments. But how on earth can we have a triple aim of trying to improve health outcomes for a population and not even give public health a voice and a seat on the decision-making body that decides health plans for an area?

The Secretary of State talks about integrating health and social care. There is no seat for directors of adult social services on these committees, either. And what about patients? Patients were not mentioned very often by the Secretary of State in his speech. Patients will always come first for the Opposition. They have no mandated institutional representation, either—no guaranteed patient voice—so we have yet another reorganisation of the NHS whereby patients are treated like ghosts in the machine. It is utterly unacceptable. This is fragmentation, not integration, with a continued sidelining of social care.

There is a loss of local accountability as well, because there is no explicit requirement that the boards meet in public or publish their board papers. Although NHS England has stated that that is its preference, it is not required; nor is there any commitment, despite the wide geographical spread of some ICSs, for meetings to be made accessible online. But, of course, the White Paper did indicate that the independent sector could have a seat on an ICS, and the explanatory notes to the Bill state that

“local areas will have the flexibility to determine any further representation.”

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about solutions to social care. Will he come on to his own solutions to social care? Will they potentially include the recommendations of the Select Committees about that German-style social care premium—recommendations made by members of his own party who were elected by his party to serve on those Committees? Is that something that he is now willing to explore? He has ruled it out time and again on the Floor of the House.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I have. The hon. Gentleman is a dogged advocate for that proposal for social care, and he is quite right: he always raises it with me. I am unpersuaded but I am more than happy to sit down with the Secretary of State and with my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West to discuss a solution to social care. We keep being told that there are going to be cross-party talks, but I think I missed the Zoom link, because they have not happened so far.

As I was saying, these committees do permit a seat, if the committees want it, for the independent sector. In Bath, in Somerset, we have seen Virgin Care get a seat on the shadow ICS. The Opposition think that is unacceptable and we shall table amendments to prohibit it.

I welcome the removal of the section 75 competition and procurement rules, finally scraping the remnants of the Lansley competition rules off the boots of the NHS. We did warn him and others that this compulsory competitive tendering would lead to billions going to the private sector, would be wasteful and bureaucratic, and would be distracting—and it even led to the NHS getting sued by Virgin Care when it did not win a contract. But this is not the end of contracting with the private sector. Without clauses to make the NHS the default provider, it would be possible for ICBs to award and extend contracts for healthcare services of unlimited value without advertising, including to private companies. Given the past year, when huge multibillion-pound contracts have been handed out for duff personal protective equipment and testing, we naturally have concerns about that and will seek safeguards in Committee. We are worried about further cronyism.

We are particularly concerned about the Bill because of the power grab clauses for the Secretary of State. He is creating 138 new powers, including seven allowing him in effect to rewrite the law through secondary legislation, to transfer functions between arm’s length bodies without any proper scrutiny. He has not explained why he needs these powers or given any guidance on how he expects to use them. These powers also include a requirement that Ministers be informed of every single service change, every single reconfiguration, and the Secretary of State will then decide whether or not to call them in for ministerial decision. Are you sure you want that power, Secretary of State?

The Government have gone from wanting to liberate the NHS under Lansley to now listening out for the clang of every dropped bedpan echoing through Whitehall. This is not a plan for service modernisation; it is a “Back to the Future” plan and it will mean more inertia. Instead of powers to interfere at every level, resetting the mandate for the NHS within years, we instead would want the duties on the Health Secretary, and therefore on the 42 ICSs to which he delegates those responsibilities, to continue the promotion in England of a comprehensive health service, as per the National Health Service Act 2006, to be fully reinstated and made explicit.

NHS Funding Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Jonathan Ashworth

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

It is unacceptable, and sadly it is happening constantly in the English NHS. Of course, on certain performance targets there is improvement in Wales; there is no improvement on any performance targets when it comes to A&E or electives in the English NHS. I welcome the hon. Lady to her place and she is right to raise that issue, but I hope she will also raise with the Secretary of State his poor leadership on performance data for the English NHS.

The long-term plan rightly calls for more investment in areas of the NHS that have been neglected for many years, particularly mental health services, community health services and primary care. We endorse the approach outlined in the long-term plan. Mental illness represents around 23% of the total disease burden, but only 11% of NHS England’s budget. Mental health patients are some of the most let down by the decade of decline in the NHS. We regularly read heartbreaking reports in the newspapers of patients forced to wait up to 112 days for talking-therapy treatments, when we know that people are supposed to get an improving access to psychological therapies appointment in six weeks. We regularly read of the shortage of mental health beds, which means that too many people—often young people—are sent hundreds of miles across the country. They are often young people in desperate circumstances, sent away from their family and friends, often receiving ineffective care in poor-quality private providers. The rationing of care for children in particularly desperate circumstances has seen more than 130,000 referrals to specialist services turned down, despite those children showing signs of eating disorders, self-harm or abuse. It is totally unacceptable.

The long-term plan calls for increased investment in mental health services, which we welcome. Had we won the general election, we would have gone further and invested more to deliver parity of esteem for physical and mental health, and we would have legislated to ensure health and wellbeing in all policies with a future generations wellbeing Act. None the less, we welcome the ambition in the long-term plan to increase the proportion spent on mental health. In the past 10 years, under intense financial pressures because of underfunding and austerity in the NHS, commissioners have had to raid budgets, especially child and adolescent mental health services budgets, to fund the wider NHS. In the past 10 years, mental health services have often lost out because of financial pressures in the system so, if such an amendment would be in scope, we will seek to amend the Bill to ensure guarantees for mental health funding and that mental health funding can be ring-fenced. We will also seek look to ensure that there is a framework of accountability, under which the Secretary of State would come to the House, perhaps once a year, to update it on mental health funding and where it is being spent.

We endorse the increased funding for mental health, community services and GP services at a faster rate. If the Government are genuinely committed to that, and if at the same time the NHS is to live within its 3.3% uplift, that means that by definition less money will remain for growth in funding for the acute sector. The Secretary of State will need to moderate the rate of growth in acute demand, because if he cannot, there is a risk that either the money that he is allocating to mental health services will be diverted back to hospitals, as has happened in the past 10 years, or waiting times will have to increase and A&E performance will have to worsen ever further.

The problem is that the Secretary of State will not be able to drive up performance and moderate need without a fully funded plan for the whole of the health and social care sector. That is why the Bill is fundamentally inadequate. When in June 2018 the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), came to the House to outline the funding settlement, he quite rightly said that he would not be able to fix the various problems facing the NHS if that did not happen alongside a funded staffing plan, a funded multi-year capital plan and a funded social care plan. The previous Secretary of State was correct. The problem with the Bill is that, as the Secretary of State conceded, it excludes key areas of health spending, such as public health; health visiting; the training of doctors and nurses; the capital budgets to build and maintain hospitals; and the capital budgets for community health facilities. That is before we even get on to social care funding, which is another issue that has in effect been kicked into the long grass by the Secretary of State.

We all know that public health services are crucial services that keep people well, prevent ill health and keep people out of hospital. A year ago, the Secretary of State would do interviews to tell us that public health and prevention was his big, No. 1 priority. I remember his interview in The Sunday Times in which he said that he had ordered the behavioural insights team to target those who are obese, smokers and people who drink to excess. He said he would “not rule out” using social media to target people to change their ways. Pregnant smokers would get emails to encourage them to stop smoking. This is my favourite; this is what he actually said—well, it is quoted in the article:

“Those in hospital with ailments related to alcohol abuse will be targeted for a ‘stern talking to’”.

That is what he said on prevention a year ago. What did we get instead? We got more cuts to smoking cessation services, more cuts to alcohol addiction services, and more cuts to drug misuse services. That is what we have had in the past 12 months, because budgets have been cut as part of the wider £870 million cut to the public health grants. The Secretary of State did not mention public health in his remarks. We still do not know what the public health allocations will be for this year. He is asking the House to legislate for a funding allocation that the previous Secretary of State outlined to the House 18 months ago. He cannot even tell us the public health allocations beyond the next three months. That just reveals what a ridiculous political stunt this Bill is.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

In his earlier remarks, the hon. Gentleman mentioned social care. He will be aware that the Health and Social Care and the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committees recommended in a joint report a range of options, one of which was a social insurance premium. Will he agree to cross-party talks, and does he think that all those different options laid out in that report should remain on the table for discussion?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is a considered authority on these matters, and I appreciate the spirit in which he has made his intervention. We are not convinced that a social insurance model will work. In those countries where there is a social insurance model—I think in Germany and in Japan—they have largely been building on a social insurance model for their healthcare delivery. In Japan—I may be wrong on this, and I will correct the record if I am wrong—there is a taxation element as well.

We believe that there is a degree of political consensus on the future funding of adult social care. We agree with the House of Lords Committee, which includes people such as Michael Forsyth and Norman Lamont, that we need a form of free adult social care paid for by taxation. There is a version of it in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. We believe that, if the Government are prepared to talk to us on those terms, we could find political consensus, but at the moment the Secretary of State stands outside that political consensus.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points, but is it not the case that the best way forward is not to have a precondition about the subject of those talks, and that we should simply have a cross-party discussion? In that way, he can find out more of the detail behind the Japanese system, which he says he is lacking. Why does he need to make preconditions to those talks?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The Government have no proposals whatsoever. They have been talking about bringing forward a social care plan for years now. As I have said before in the House, Members are more likely to see the Secretary of State riding Shergar at Newmarket than see a social care plan. The truth is that, if the Government want to put forward some proposals, we will always be happy to talk to them. We are clear that taxation is the best way to fund adult social care, and that we need a version of free personal adult social care. That is what we have put in our manifesto, and that is what the House of Lords has proposed, and, as I have pointed out, there are some very Thatcherite Tories on that Committee in the House of Lords—they are by no means red in tooth and claw socialists. They have looked at all these different options and came to the conclusion that a taxation-funded system is the best way to go, but, of course, we are prepared to have discussions. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the way in which he put his question. He is a very thoughtful figure in the House and he has done a lot of work on this matter, and Members on both sides of the House appreciate that.

As I was saying, the Secretary of State cannot tell us the allocations for public health budgets beyond the next three months. We have talked about capital, but we still do not have a multi-year capital settlement. We still do not know whether the Secretary of State will rule out the capital to revenue transfers that have taken place over the past 10 years. If we can find an amendment in scope, we will put it down to rule out capital to revenue transfers. If he agrees that capital to revenue transfers are not in the interests of our hospitals that desperately need to deal with their repair backlog, I hope that he will support such an amendment.

The Bill does not provide a proper costed plan for the workforce. There is nothing in the Bill on training budgets, when every single trust chief executive reports that understaffing is their biggest challenge, and a hindrance to delivering safe care. The numbers employed by trusts over the past decade have grown at half the rate of 2000, and this is at a time of increasing need. As I have said, with vacancies numbering more than 100,000, the situation across the NHS is chronic. Staff shortages mean overcrowded wards, lengthening queues in A&E, cancelled operations and exhausted, burned-out staff with low morale who feel that they must do more with less. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the numbers leaving the NHS citing bad work-life balance has trebled under this Government.

In these circumstances, the Government expect to retain 19,000 nurses and recruit an additional 31,000, although they are not actually bringing back a full bursary to do so. At the same time, vacancies for nursing today stand at about 44,000, so the Government are hardly going to resolve the crisis in nurse vacancies that our trusts are facing. Not only have the Government failed to train enough nurses, they have not dealt with the taxation changes affecting doctors. On diagnostics, one in 10 posts are vacant in England, so if the Government are to meet their promise to diagnose three in four cancers at an early stage by 2028, we need to see significant growth in the NHS cancer workforce as well. We have no funded workforce plan, even though it was promised by the Government when they announced these funding allocations back in summer 2018.

This all matters, because the NHS will simply not be turned around without the investment in public health that is needed, without recruiting the extra staff that are needed, without modernising buildings and equipment and without fixing our broken social care service. The Secretary of State will not be able to improve performance across the NHS and level up health outcomes while the Government continue to pursue their austerity agenda.

We have seen a decade of cuts, which has seen child poverty rising—it is set to rise to record levels—increasing rough sleeping on our streets, insecure work becoming the norm, poor quality housing becoming commonplace, local services being cut back and closed, and an increase in air pollution. All of these things determine the health of our constituents.

Austerity means that the advances in life expectancy that we have come to expect since the second world war have begun to stall. Infant mortality rates have increased three years in a row. The last time that that happened was during the second world war. We are seeing increasing mortality rates for those in their 40s—so-called deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol abuse—and the gap between the health of the richest and the health of the poorest getting wider and wider. Not only have we seen in this decade of austerity widening inequalities in health outcomes, but we are now seeing widening inequalities in access to health services—the poorest wait longer in A&E, the poorest wait longer for a GP appointment because there are fewer GPs in poorer areas, the poorest have fewer hip replacements, and the poorest are less likely to recover from mental ill health.