Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Bray of Coln

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

rose—

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Lansley]

I give way to my hon. Friend.

[Angie Bray]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that, and I thank him, too, for coming to Acton last week and spending a long evening in a room full of health professionals—doctors, dentists and pharmacists. Does he agree that there was a real desire in that room to engage constructively in discussion on the reforms rather than to turn their back on them, as the Labour party would?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her initiative in bringing doctors, dentists and nurses together to have that conversation. I really appreciated it, and I thought that it illustrated exactly what I have found—that, although not everybody in the room agreed with the Bill—[Laughter]—many did. Contrary to what I see on the Labour Benches, they all wanted to design better services for patients. They cared about patients and engaged in a proper debate about how to achieve that.

I am still trying to find out what it is in the Bill that the right hon. Member for Leigh is against. Is it the fact that the Bill strengthens the NHS constitution? He should be proud of that; he introduced it. For the first time, however, the Bill requires the Secretary of State to have regard to it and the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups to promote it. He is not against that, I presume.

What about the fact that, for the first time, the NHS Commissioning Board and commissioners will have a duty to promote integration throughout health and social care? Is the right hon. Gentleman against integrated care? I do not know. Let me try another question. What about the prohibition in clauses 146, 22 and 61 of discrimination in favour of private providers, which is in legislation for the first time? The right hon. Gentleman may be against that, because when his party was in office, that is what the Government did. They discriminated in favour of private sector providers, and we ended up with £250 million being spent on operations that never took place and the NHS being paid more for operations when it was not even allowed to bid for the work.

What about the creation of a strong statutory voice for patients through HealthWatch? The Labour Government destroyed the community health councils, they destroyed patient forums, and they left local involvement networks neutered. When they were in office, they were pretty dismissive of a strong patient voice. Well, we on the Government Benches are not, and the Bill will establish that patient voice. Is the right hon. Gentleman against all trusts becoming foundation trusts? The Bill will make that happen, and will support it—oh, no, I forgot: according to the Labour party manifesto, Labour wanted all trusts to become foundation trusts.

Let us keep moving through the Bill. Is the right hon. Gentleman against directly engaging local government in the commissioning of health services, integrating health and social care, and leading population health—public health—improvement plans? I ask the question not least because Labour local authorities throughout England are in favour of that. They want to improve the health of the people whom they represent. Is the right hon. Gentleman against local democratic accountability? The list could go on. Is he against the provision of a regulator—Monitor—whose duty is to protect the interests of patients by promoting quality, stopping anti-competitive practices that could harm patients, supporting the integration of services, and securing the continuity of services? Is he against that? It is in the coalition agreement, but I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman is against it or not, because he does not say.

Is the right hon. Gentleman against statutory backing for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to support its work on quality? I do not know; we have not heard. Is he against developing the tariff so that it pays for quality and outcomes, not for activity? He knows that that has to happen, and he knows that it has been the right thing to do for the best part of a decade, but we have no idea whether he is against it now.

I cannot discover what the right hon. Gentleman is actually against. He sits there and says that he is against the Bill, but he is not against anything that is in the Bill. He is against the Bill because he has literally made up what he claims it says. He says that it is about privatisation—

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Bray of Coln

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I will tell the hon. Lady what most frightens me: it is that if we had carried on the inheritance from Labour, with waste and bureaucracy escalating and a year-on-year reduction in productivity in the NHS, in a financially challenged environment the quality of patient care would have suffered. At the moment, we have an NHS that is doing magnificently well at raising performance across the service while transforming itself to meet future challenges.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

This feels like groundhog day—nothing ever seems to change. Every time the Labour party brings this issue to the House, we hear the same statements, questions and scaremongering. Does the Secretary of State agree that we hear nothing new from the Labour party? All we hear is the same scaremongering—nothing new, no new thinking.

[Mr Lansley]

I bring good news to my hon. Friend. Out there in the real world, things are changing: there are clinicians, doctors and nurses across the country who are taking the opportunity of this responsibility to improve services for patients; there are patients who realise that they will get additional voice and choice; and there are local authorities that realise that, through their health and wellbeing boards, they can use this to drive improvements in health for their population. Those are the things that are changing. Unfortunately, not only is the Labour party not changing but it is going backwards.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Bray of Coln

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The right hon. Lady should understand, as I will go on to explain, that we are not distracting the NHS from the need to improve services for patients. We are enabling the NHS to improve services for patients. In her role on the Public Accounts Committee, she should understand that right across the public services, one of the consequences of dealing with the deficit is that we will have to reduce the costs of bureaucracy and administration.

We will do that in the NHS as much as anywhere else, but we will not do it in the way that the Labour party pressed us to do, which was to cut the NHS budget—[Hon. Members: “What?”] Yes, Opposition Members did exactly that. We will increase the NHS budget. As we set out in the spending review, we will increase the NHS budget by £10.7 billion over the life of this Parliament—investment that Labour opposed—and we are determined to get far more for British taxpayers’ money.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will be aware that there has recently been an excellent reorganisation of stroke treatment in London, with a number of hospitals earmarked as emergency centres, all of which, crucially, are within 30 minutes of every Londoner. Once patients have been through the emergency procedures and are stabilised, they are returned to local stroke centres, which are also earmarked as part of the whole programme. Can he reassure me that that kind of regional organisation of hospitals, which has delivered good results, will not suffer through some of the proposed reforms?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I remind Members that interventions should be short. There are 57 Members seeking to speak in the debate, so interventions must be pithy.