National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) (Amendment) Regulations 2017

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Hamwee

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am moving this Motion because I believe the regulations on charges for overseas visitors do not clarify how up-front charging can work without increasing barriers to healthcare for very vulnerable groups. They do not explain how they will not breach equality legislation through the potential use of racial profiling as a means of identifying chargeable patients. The regulations do not show how the extension of charging to community services will not lead to patients being prevented from accessing preventive care programmes. I also believe that it is a matter for further regret that these regulations have been introduced without sufficient checks of the effectiveness and value for money of the very bureaucratic process proposed.

Let me say at once that, on the face of it, charging overseas visitors to use our hard-pressed NHS is entirely reasonable. But the Government’s latest plans to extend charges to community services will raise very little money, place a huge bureaucratic burden on the NHS and deny healthcare to very vulnerable people. The UK already charges some overseas visitors for most hospital care after treatment. Patients who are not eligible for free care include short-term visitors, undocumented migrants and some asylum seekers whose claims have been refused. There are already processes in place for hospitals to identify and bill such patients. We understand that in addition to these regulations, the Government are considering extending charging to A&E and GP services.

Under the regulations that came into force last month, all community services receiving NHS funding, including charities and social enterprises, are now legally required to check every patient’s paperwork, including passports and proof of address, before they receive a service to see whether they should pay for their care. Charges are up front, with non-urgent care refused. As a person will need to provide paperwork and/or a passport to prove eligibility, there is a distinct possibility that people who are entitled to free care on the NHS will be denied treatment because they do not have it at hand. Particularly vulnerable groups here include the elderly, asylum seekers, homeless people and mentally ill people. Moreover, if patients continually have to provide details every time they need healthcare, this risks them waiting longer, with an inevitable increase in bureaucracy.

Asylum Matters, in conjunction with a number of other organisations, has commented in response to the Minister, who has written both to Members of this House and to MPs in the House of Commons to allay fears about how patient ID checks will be carried out. He says that the changes do not require a patient to provide a means of identification to qualify for free care. He says that, while that may be helpful in demonstrating eligibility, other information will be used by trained NHS staff to ensure that the residency status of a patient is identified. He says that the regulations simply require that a relevant body must make such inquiries that it is satisfied are reasonable in the circumstance to determine whether charges should be made. The problem is that those protections are not built into the regulations. They may be in the guidance but guidance can be changed at any point, and they cannot be enforced if NHS organisations choose to insist on further proof of a patient’s ID.

I have been written to by many people, and I would like to refer to a very important paper sent to me by Natalie Bloomer, in which she refers to the father of a newborn baby who recently received a letter from his local hospital demanding to know whether his eight day-old child was entitled to free healthcare. The parents wondered if they had received the letter due to the mother’s foreign-sounding maiden name. When the father went back to the hospital, it quickly told the family to disregard the letter. For me, this highlights the whole problem of this wretched and miserable policy. It is quite clear to me that, apart from the dreadful impression and reputation it gives of our country, many people who legitimately live here and have every right to NHS treatment are going to be challenged by the NHS. I find this absolutely despicable.

I gather that the Secretary of State has claimed that charging regulations simply bring us into line with our European neighbours. Of course, this is complete nonsense. The work done by Doctors of the World, which I have seen, has been researched comprehensively, and the fact is that many European countries, particularly the ones we tend to compare ourselves with, actually provide a more comprehensive package of free healthcare—for instance, to undocumented migrants.

I receive many briefings and letters from reputable organisations. This regret Motion has been backed by many trusted and well-respected bodies, including the BMA, the Royal College of Midwives, Doctors of the World UK, the National AIDS Trust, Asylum Matters and Freedom from Torture. Many of them represent groups which will be intimately affected by the regulation introducing and extending overseas charges.

They are not the only ones to oppose this new policy. An open letter addressed to the Secretary of State, published by 193 organisations and 880 individuals, has called for the regulations to be dropped as soon as possible. Among the signatories were 300 doctors, 50 nurses, the former NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Amnesty International. Not only were they all agreed that the introduction and extension of charges will place a greater burden on the NHS, but this is the kind of thing that the Conservative Government pledged to cut down—the wretched bureaucracy involved and the time that will be spent by staff trying to make these charges work. The Royal College of General Practitioners has flagged up the possibility the new system could end up overstretching already strained family doctors at medical centres. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference, in its letter, spoke of the catastrophic consequences of the new regulations and asked for them to be suspended.

Not only is this a ludicrous action by the Government, it will have no impact whatever on the finances of the NHS. The estimate is that it will bring a £200,000 saving—how ridiculous. The point I want to make in the debate tonight is that these rules are now already law. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference has asked for the regulations to be suspended, and I hope the Minister can announce that he is going to do that, but at the least there should be an early independent review of how the new charges are operating. Until then, there can be no question of extending charges to yet more services. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the organisations that have briefed us. Sending a joint briefing was particularly helpful, not because it reduces the paper but because it increases the force of the content. It came from Asylum Matters, Doctors of the World UK, NAT and Freedom from Torture. We have had briefings from others too. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. Like him, I understand that some charging of visitors is entirely reasonable, but—and it is a very big but—the noble Lord has raised some very pointed questions wrapped up in the text of his Motion, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to those point by point.

This is not a new problem for some groups but it is now worse. During the passage of the Immigration Bill, now the Immigration Act 2014, the points were put forcefully—especially, I remember, by those concerned with maternal health and by doctors who were working with a wide range of immigrants. I remember hearing from Doctors of the World UK that, before the regulations which followed that Act came into force, there were queues round the block at its clinic of people who were anxious about what their position would be afterwards.

The charging then was presented as an innocuous extension of the system, and really very beneficial. There was a lot of talk about health tourism blocking access for those of us who are not tourists. I began to think that the world must be full of people who had had their pregnancy confirmed and immediately booked a flight for the due date minus however many weeks the chosen airline applied as the cut-off for carrying pregnant women. At that time, it became clear that many hospitals found the charging system then in force so burdensome that it had simply defeated them, and there was a good deal of criticism of those that were defeated, I recall. This time around, again there has been considerable protest from people who have seen at first hand the effect of what the pre-23 October regulations require.

When I looked for the government impact assessment on the regulations, I found an evaluation by Ipsos MORI of the overseas visitor and migrant NHS cost recovery programme, published in January this year but apparently started in 2014. The paragraph on the costs and benefits of implementation made startling reading—which I found difficult because I printed it off in such a small font. It made me doubt whether there really was benefit to the implementation. What continued valuation will there be? This is another way of asking the question that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, asked: will the Government consult before extending the charges into other health services, including A&E and GP services? The letter that the Secretary of State wrote in response to the open letter seems to say these things are so because they are so. I am sure that there cannot be as relaxed an attitude as that seems to suggest.