National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[David Tredinnick]

Madam Deputy Speaker, you are kind to draw that to my attention. I simply say this: there are different regulatory bodies—not just Monitor—that we should consider. We should be taking on board the fact that osteopaths, chiropractors and homeopathic doctors are regulated by separate Acts of Parliament, yet the Health and Care Professions Council regulates clinical scientists, paramedics, physiotherapists. The Professional Standards Authority, which is another regulatory body, provides oversight of nine statutory bodies. Then there is the umbrella body, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council. I will leave it at that, as I do not wish to stray. On the safety aspects of those bodies, I understand from Balens, which has been insuring support services for 10 years, that there has not been a claim against a herbalist for more than 10 years.

The Bill partly addresses the issue of the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. Across the world, there is a whole mass of new thinking that could be incorporated in our health service. I am nervous that if we take out TTIP—if an exemption for the NHS is proposed—it will not be in our interests. In America there are a lot of integrated practices, in which a range of different health disciplines are brought together to reduce costs.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government and the European Commission have made it clear that decisions on the provision of public services will continue to be made by the Government here in Westminster?

[David Tredinnick]

We are agreed on that. It is a case of the extent to which we derogate the powers of the Secretary of State. We have a whole lot of new bodies, including clinical commissioning groups, which have been a great success.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham on securing this slot today. I wonder whether he still has 100 troops in the Tea Room waiting to come in for a closure motion, if Madam Deputy Speaker is gracious enough to grant it. I am happy to serve with him in the future on his Bill.

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[Andy Burnham]

I will give the hon. Gentleman my message now: the Labour Government in England and in Wales have taken steps to bring down NHS waiting lists. When we left office, they were at the lowest ever level. I make no apology to him for those improvements.

The 2012 Act has put the NHS in danger, which is why it has to go. Back on that March day in 2012, I pledged that the party that created the NHS would repeal that Bill at the first opportunity, and today we honour that promise. The Bill before us, presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), restores the right values at the heart of the NHS: collaboration over competition; integration over fragmentation; people before profits.

[Angie Bray]

Will the right hon. Gentleman care to comment on the letter in The Daily Telegraph today, signed by a number of doctors and led by the chairman of NHS Alliance, asking people not to support this Bill, as it would be a backward step for patients?

[Andy Burnham]

I am sure that Tory central office has been ringing around for a few days trying to find some doctors who are still in favour of the 2012 legislation, and they found 11. Well, I think that is probably about the limit for the number of people prepared to put their name to it. I can tell the hon. Lady that thousands of doctors lined up with the Opposition and pleaded with her party to call off its reorganisation, and that included the British Medical Association and the royal colleges, but it would not listen. The Government ploughed on regardless, and the NHS has gone downhill ever since.

That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham gave a stirring speech of the kind this House needs to hear more, full of conviction and passion, standing up for the national health service that he believes in. He has brought before the House a Bill that reaffirms the words of Nye Bevan’s original National Health Service Act 1946 on the democratic accountability of the NHS to the Secretary of State and, by extension, to this House. The Bill abolishes the compulsory tendering of NHS services and removes market forces. It reduces the private patient income cap back down to single figures. Once and for all, it fully exempts the NHS from EU procurement and competition law, as is our right under the Lisbon treaty. It sends the Government an uncompromising message that the NHS will never be touched by any TTIP treaty.

In particular, I commend my hon. Friend for saying that it is about time this House regained full sovereignty over the national health service. They gave it away—the Eurosceptics sitting there on the Government Back Benches—when they mandated open tendering of services. By doing that, they placed the NHS in the full glare of European competition law. [Interruption.] They do not like to hear it, but that is what they did.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

I shall begin by returning to the founding moment of our NHS, when a national health service was created which remains to this day a world-class health service where care is available to all, irrespective of ability to pay and free for all at the point of delivery. These fundamental principles of our NHS have been cherished and protected by each and every Government throughout its proud history, and were in 2012, for the first time, put on to statutory footing by this Government through the Health and Social Care Act.

[Angie Bray]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Poulter]

If my hon. Friend will bear with me, I am going to make a little more progress and then give way later on.

Those who believe that our NHS has always been run solely through public providers are of course very wrong. From its very inception, the NHS that Nye Bevan created has comprised providers in the public and the non-public sectors. In 1948, independent GPs, community pharmacists and dental practitioners contracted with our health service to provide primary medical services to patients, and they continue to do so to this day as part of the public-private partnership. It is worth reflecting on the fact that Tony Blair’s former political secretary, John McTiernan, said only this August that

“an NHS without private providers is unimaginable. For one thing, no one—even on Labour’s extreme left—is arguing that we should nationalise general practice. But GPs are private providers, acceptable to opponents of the ‘private sector’ because most encounters with the NHS are visits to your local doctor”.

We also take for granted the key role played by charities and the voluntary sector in providing NHS care to patients across the country, notably Macmillan Cancer Support and Marie Curie Cancer Care.

In opening my contribution to this debate, I reaffirm this Government’s commitment to the founding principles of our NHS, a health service free at the point of delivery, and recognise that since its creation by Nye Bevan in 1948 our NHS has always been a public-private partnership. For public services to be equitable and free at the point of use, they did not all need to be provided on a monopoly basis within the public sector, controlled in a rigid way by local bureaucracies often deeply resistant to innovation and genuine local autonomy.

“The aim should be to change fundamentally the way the NHS was run: to break up the monolith; to introduce a new relationship with the private sector; to import concepts of choice and competition”.

Those are not my words, but those of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair about the reforms to the NHS that he introduced under the previous Labour Government.

[Angie Bray]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the most damaging thing for the NHS—patients and staff alike—is a lot of misleading scaremongering? I am afraid that we have heard more of that in the Chamber today. Will he correct the record to make sure that it is very clear that the pledge made by the Secretary of State for Health that the A and Es at Ealing and Charing Cross hospitals will both remain open for the long term still stands, and that they will allow themselves to be directed by Bruce Keogh’s report such that whatever recommendations he makes on A and E, they will make sure that they meet those requirements?

[Dr Poulter]

I am happy to confirm and to put on the record the points that my hon. Friend has made. It is important that the NHS is not used as a political football, and that services are always designed and delivered in the right way for patients. There is often too much scaremongering in these debates. I reiterate that what she said about the local A and Es is absolutely correct.