Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Baroness Tonge

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, these amendments deal specifically with the national Commissioning Board, but of course the issue of costs and bureaucracy extends well beyond this particular creation of the Bill. In fact, the Bill establishes something like a new health solar system, at the centre of which of course will be the Secretary of State, a perhaps rather dimmer sun than we would like to see—some of us, at any rate—but nevertheless at the centre of a system in which he will circled by a veritable constellation of boards and bodies. Along with the national Commissioning Board and its wonderfully euphemistically named “field offices”, which, as we understand it, will effectively be local commissioning boards of some kind, there will be Monitor, the clinical commissioning groups, clinical senates, clinical networks, directors of public health embedded in local government, Public Health England with perhaps four regional hubs, and 25 local units of the Health Protection Agency. There will still be some special health authorities and of course NICE. All of this is a formidable complex of organisations and the risks to which my noble friend has referred of the escalating costs of bureaucracy are self-evident.

There are particular examples of that, and the noble Lord, Lord Warner, touched on the question of support for commissioning. The recent draft recommendations that the Government have produced about that raise concerns about how that will function and about the costs involved. My noble friend referred to the National Audit Office looking particularly at the national Commissioning Board, but it seems to me that the abolition of the Audit Commission is something that the Government and the public generally may come to regret. Its rather more extensive and comparative work in looking at the way the health service operates, and indeed the way local government operates, will not be entirely replicated by the National Audit Office, perhaps ultimately to the detriment of the service.

I want to look not just at the long-term future but at the immediate costs of the reorganisation envisaged by the Bill, because this week saw the publication of the aptly named Operating Framework for the NHS in England 2012-13, which contains a reference to a requirement for all primary care trusts to set aside 2 per cent of their recurrent funding for non-recurrent expenditure purposes. That has been the case for the last couple of years and that non-recurrent expenditure has been effectively devoted to the service itself. The current framework suggests that:

“The non-recurrent cost of organisational and system change … will need to be met from the 2 per cent”—

in effect, the cost of this Bill and its implementation. Is the Minister in a position to say how much of that 2 per cent, which is estimated to amount to some £3.4 billion, will be devoted to these non-recurrent costs of the system change? Can he also give an indication of the costs of working through the structures of the national Commissioning Board and other bodies that the amendments directly address?

I have sympathy with the aspirations of my noble friend in moving these amendments although, as he acknowledged, it would be somewhat unusual to place restrictions of this kind on the face of the Bill. It will be important to hear the Minister’s views about how the future finances can be managed.

[Baroness Tonge]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I would like to remind him and the House that several Committee sessions ago, I asked the Minister to find out how much it is going to cost to disband the primary care trusts and how much it will cost to set up the clinical commissioning groups. I think this is all very relevant in this question—that we have absolutely no idea at all how much the change in bureaucracy is going to cost.

[Lord Beecham]

The noble Baroness encapsulates in about two minutes the thrust of what I said in five; she is precisely right. There are clearly going to be costs—redundancy costs, relocation costs and property costs—which we have not yet seen clarified in the case of the Audit Commission which I mentioned despite the fact that the proposal has been around for 18 months. It would be enlightening if the Minister responded to my question and that of the noble Baroness.