Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Rea

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, I would like to make a very few remarks on competition versus co-operation from a clinical rather than a legal position, as I am baffled by the complex legality of the amendments on Monitor.

As the noble Earl knows, like many others I have always had concerns about the wisdom of introducing market competition into healthcare. Co-operation and collaboration between providers should always be the norm for the benefit of patients and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said, it is much less costly. However, it is good to know that competition is now to be on quality and not on price. This removes, theoretically at least, the race to the bottom which has been shown to result in worse outcomes in a number of studies, particularly, as other noble Lords have pointed out, in the United States.

Recently there have been three studies in the UK on competition in healthcare, of which that by Zack Cooper and colleagues at the LSE, looking at hospital data covering 400,000 admissions from 2003 to 2008, is the largest and the best known. They claim to show that competition on quality can improve the outcome for patients with a myocardial infarction or coronary thrombosis. Although carefully conducted, and allowing for many variables, the paper has been criticised by statisticians for the elementary but common scientific mistake of equating correlation with causation.

The mortality rate certainly did fall in the hospitals deemed to have been involved in choice and competition. They were deemed to be such because they were close to other comparable hospitals, mostly in urban areas. The researchers were unable to measure competition as such, which of course is a weakness of the study. The mortality rates in these hospitals were compared to those in hospitals outside these areas with more scattered populations who were likely to have less choice and to use only one hospital. However, differences in the mortality rate could have been due to a number of clinical and diagnostic factors, unconnected to competition, which applied more to the urban than the provincial hospitals. For instance, the urban areas were more likely to contain teaching hospitals, which often lead on the introduction of new treatments.

Another report deemed to show that competition is beneficial was commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons. It showed that outcomes for elective surgery at independent sector treatment centres were better than those for similar procedures carried out in National Health Service hospitals that also offered emergency care. This is not surprising, for several reasons. The patients at the ISTCs were younger and in better general health; they came from more affluent areas; and they were less likely to have co-morbidities. Therefore, the surgeons at the ISTCs had a more straightforward task and by concentrating on a few surgical procedures may have become more skilled in that limited area.

There is nothing to stop National Health Service hospitals setting up dedicated wards and teams to concentrate on routine operations, with doctors working in those sections being protected from being diverted to treat more urgent or seriously ill emergency cases. A number of National Health Service hospitals have done this quite successfully, providing treatments at a lower cost than those commissioned from the private sector. Two years ago ISTCs received some 11 per cent more remuneration than the National Health Service for doing the same work. Of course I am aware that the National Health Service sometimes needs the private sector to clear a backlog. However, this should be temporary, if only for economic reasons. As many other noble Lords said, competition is welcome and necessary within the National Health Service but should be between hospitals, clinicians and other providers vying to be judged the best. In most cases there is only a temporary need to use commercial, competitive providers. I hope that these general remarks have helped the debate.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I will intervene only briefly because most of the points on competition were made very eloquently, in particular by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Owen. My amendments would rather more crudely delete references to anti-competitive behaviour. One thing I will draw to the Committee's attention is that the terminology maximises the chances of this going wrong. The earlier version of the Bill referred to “promoting competition”—in other words, encouraging more providers—which was a relatively benign intervention if one believes that that is the way to go. By referring to “preventing anti-competitive behaviour” we are turning Monitor from being an accreditor and promoter of more providers to being the policeman of the nascent market. That will put it in a very vulnerable position.

All competition and sector regulators that have this duty are inevitably faced with appeals, complaints and other interventions by unsuccessful providers or potential providers, which go through a quasi-legal process with the regulator. The Bill provides that if that is not acceptable, the issue may go to the competition authorities, which rely on the general principles of competition and also—as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, eloquently underlined—of procurement law. Therefore, in almost every case of commissioning the allocation of the contract will be opened to appeal on the grounds that it overrides competition. However, as noble Lords said, there are hundreds of thousands of situations where collaboration and integration, vertically and horizontally, and even mergers between providers, would be in the interests of patients. The Minister said that clearly in all cases the interests of patients were the most important issue. Indeed, the very useful document describing Monitor’s role states that the regulations would help ensure that competition is not applied inappropriately, and only ever in the interests of patients. Well, that is what we would all wish to see. I certainly would not wish to deny Monitor the ability to encourage competition, but if there is an appeal against a particular award by a particular commissioning body, Monitor and the higher courts have to be in a position of judging whether or not the award was in the interests of patients. That seems a severe restriction on the ability of Monitor to provide its general services because it will be engaged in all these cases of complaint and appeal.

There are things that would fit in with the Government’s overall philosophy— which in this area I do not happen to share—but that would not open the door to such a multitude of appeals and to the wider application, referred to by other noble Lords, of both general EU and UK competition and procurement law, which would tie large parts of the National Health Service up in knots.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Rea

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I will leave that question for the Minister, because it clearly raises wider issues. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that one of the most acute effects of all this will be at the district level, where the funds are less protected, and where there is already some difficulty and some serious variability in performance and resourcing.

Given the Government’s support for the establishment of a chief environmental health officer at the centre to help co-ordinate all these issues and—if you like—to punch the weight of environmental health in the other range of priorities which the Department of Health has to pursue, I would ask the Minister this. Will the assessment of public health and the ongoing process she described in trying to defend the Bill from not spelling this out in great detail, lists or no lists, be available to us before we complete the consideration of this Bill, the exact timescale of which looks ever lengthier? Nevertheless, before we reach final conclusions on this, we need to have greater clarity on the direction in which the Government are going on public health, and, I would argue, on environmental health in particular.

I shall mention one other issue that relates to this. The abolition of the HPA also has significant implications in this area. I intend to come back to this at a later stage, but some of the functions of what are currently statutory authorities are going to go to Public Health England, as I understand it, and there is some confusion there as to how that will be carried out, what authority those roles will have and what their local manifestations will be. Under the new structure we will have health protection units around the country. So that is just one more complication here. By Report we ought to have some greater clarity in the strategy of the Government. I ask the Minister to give us an indication of that.

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, I had not intended to intervene on this amendment, but just from memory, I can think of several areas where the presence of an environmental health officer at the centre would perhaps have speeded things up. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, alluded to air quality, but there are other examples as well. I am old enough to remember the smog of 1951 and the enormous benefit of the Clean Air Act which followed a few years later. I was also in your Lordships’ House when lead-free petrol was debated, and when that became law nationally. There is also the question of food safety—the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, will know all about this—particularly the BSE epidemic, when it became necessary to ban animal-sourced feed for ruminant animals. Again, that required national legislation. Local environmental health officers, who do a fantastically important job, would not have been able to deal with these things on a local basis.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Rea

Monday 14th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I apologise to those I informed that I would not be here to move Amendment 59A—I am here and so I will.

Noble Lords will probably appreciate that I have severe misgivings about aspects of the Bill but the amendment attempts to build on parts of the Bill of which I largely approve. The devolution of commissioning is important, but the later provisions in the Bill which associate issues of public health and well-being more clearly with the role of the health and social care system are also important.

When we are talking about configuration in the sense of bureaucratic bodies, it is important to try to build into this a relationship between what are mainly local authority services and those services which will be commissioned by the new commissioning groups. The original form of the commissioning groups in terms of GP commissions has been altered somewhat but there will obviously be quite a number of them. We do not know how many of these commissioning groups are envisaged by the Government. This amendment attempts to say that there ought to be a relationship between commissioning groups and the local authority boundaries within which they operate. It is intended to be a relatively flexible operation, although it would be very sensible in many areas for there to be a total coincidence in coterminous boundaries between commissioning groups and local authorities. In others, there may well be more than one, but I still think some recognition of a relationship with the local authority services is important. It is important not only in the provision of social care and dealing with the developing conditions of individual patients and users, but for environmental health issues, on which I have later amendments. The public health service should ensure that the commissioning authorities recognise the importance of work in the public health area and the need to co-operate with the public health authorities.

It is actually quite difficult to get the National Health Service, at both local and policy level, to take into account in its operational work the need for a public health dimension. There have been some significant improvements in this relationship in recent years, but they need to go further. I am therefore suggesting that, in principle, we should ensure that there is a relationship between the commissioning groups, the public health authorities and public health and well-being committees, and the local authorities that provide social care and public and environmental health services. It is intended to be reasonably flexible. Clearly such coterminosity, if that is a word, would not apply to specialist commissioning groups and, as I have said, I am not suggesting that there should be only a single commissioning group within each local authority area; although there would be advantages in that, it would cut across a lot of what the Government are attempting to do. I think, however, that somewhere in this Bill—not necessarily in the precise terms of this amendment—there needs to be a very clear relationship written in between the public health boundaries and the commissioning boundaries as they are envisaged in the new configuration. I beg to move.

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, following the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, I raised this issue briefly on the second day of Committee. I felt, however, that the Minister only gave a partial answer. CCGs must have an “area” as set out in their constitution, but there seems to be nothing in the Bill which defines the limit of this area or its basis other than that CCGs will cover the registered practice population of the GPs sitting on the CCG. This will result in very untidy boundaries which will interdigitate with a variable number of other CCGs.

However, proposed new subsection (1A) in Clause 10(3) says that a clinical commissioning group has responsibility for other people resident in its area but not registered with a GP—homeless people, rough sleepers, asylum seekers, et cetera. A geographical boundary for those people is therefore implied. Can the Minister say how this boundary is to be delineated? Will it coincide, as my noble friend has suggested, with the local authority, or with the former PCT—which in fact in 85 per cent of cases will be the same as the local authority boundary—or will it have some other basis? There is a strong case for—sorry about this word again—coterminosity with local authorities. They provide many of the services on which GPs depend. In fact, they are an integral part of primary care, such as social services and community health services, and public health, including maternal and child welfare services. They are especially important as, under the Bill, local authorities will all have their own director of public health. There are a number of services which were formerly provided by PCTs on a geographical basis: for example, ambulance and emergency services, genito-urinary medicine clinics, and drug and alcohol services. These are by no means all the services which CCGs will have to commission or co-operate with. What arrangements will be made for the area that these services will have to provide for?