NHS Reorganisation

Angela Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

If the right hon. Gentleman reads the official record, he will see I have just said that I will back plans to get the efficiency savings out of the NHS. They are needed and they have to happen, and I will back them as long as all the savings are reused for front-line services to patients.

Faced with the toughest test in its history, the least NHS patients and staff can expect is that the Government keep their funding promise. At this time of all times, the last thing the NHS needs is a big internal reorganisation. The Prime Minister ruled out such a reorganisation before the election, saying:

“With the Conservatives there will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS”.

The right hon. Gentleman, now the Secretary of State, ruled it out, saying that the NHS

“needs no more top-down reorganisations”.

The coalition agreement was clear and reassuring on this point. In it, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister pledged:

“We will stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care”.

That was before the Secretary of State’s White Paper plans, which the head of the King’s Fund has called

“the biggest organisational upheaval in the health service, probably since its inception”.

Promise made in May, broken in July. Promise made by the Prime Minister, broken by the Secretary of State.

There is a story doing the rounds in the media of a journalist being briefed by No. 10, early on the morning of the publication of the White Paper, and told

“there’s nothing much new in it.”

When did the Secretary of State tell the Prime Minister that he was breaking his promise? When did he tell the Prime Minister that he was not only breaking the Government’s promise but forcing the NHS through the biggest reorganisation in its history, with a £3 billion bill attached, at a time when all efforts should be dedicated to achieving sound efficiencies and improving care for patients? This is high cost and high risk; it is untested and unnecessary.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

The Public Accounts Committee has identified that improving integration and co-ordination of services for the 580,000 people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis would deliver efficiency savings on the annual £560 million bill faced by the NHS each year for this care. The National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society believes, however, that the new commissioning responsibilities outlined in the White Paper

“risk increasing fragmentation in services”

and reducing savings overall. Does my right hon. Friend agree?

[John Healey]

In a way it does not matter whether I agree; it matters much more that the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society and many other patients groups are deeply concerned about this.

It is not just patients groups but professional bodies and NHS experts who are worried. Even the GPs are not convinced, and they are meant to be the winners in all this. They are meant to be the ones planning, buying and managing the rest of the NHS’s services. A King’s Fund survey carried out last month found that fewer than one in four GPs believe that the plans will improve patient care, and only one in five believe that the NHS will be able to maintain the focus on efficiency at the same time.