National Health Service

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Burns]

I will now make progress.

Treatments available on the NHS are based on clinical need. There should never be any arbitrary rationing based on cost either locally or nationally—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Leigh shouts from a sedentary position, “There is”, and waves a piece of paper a little like Chamberlain on his way back from Munich, but if the piece of paper that the right hon. Gentleman is waving is his NHS health check, which officials in my Department have looked at, it is as worthless as the piece of paper that Chamberlain brought back from Munich.

If the right hon. Gentleman has any genuine evidence based on the cost of care, I and the Department of Health will certainly investigate it. Such practices are totally unacceptable, and we will take them very seriously indeed, but until then, although the motion talks about “the evidence presented”, the truth is that there is none.

The right hon. Gentleman claims that the number of cataract operations has fallen significantly since we came to power, but the reason for the fall is that clinicians have advised that the surgery is inappropriate in many cases—on clinical grounds. Surgery is available, however, for those patients who are clinically eligible, and they will receive it when there is a clinical reason.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Burns]

No, I am making progress.

The motion notes the growing involvement of the private sector, insisting that it represents evidence of growing privatisation. Not only is that unadulterated tosh, but I personally find it offensive to be accused of seeking to privatise the NHS, when in my political philosophy one of my core beliefs is in an NHS free at the point of use for all those eligible to use it.

Not only does the right hon. Gentleman have some difficulty understanding the meaning of “privatisation”, but he forgets his own record in government. The only plan to increase the private provision of NHS services came under the previous Government when he was Minister, when his hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) was the special adviser and when Patricia Hewitt was Health Secretary. In May 2007, the right hon. Gentleman said:

“Now the private sector puts its capacity into the NHS for the benefit of NHS patients, which I think most people in this country would celebrate.”

Those are his words. It was his Government who saw private companies paid 11% more than NHS providers for doing the same work, and who wasted £297 million on operations that never happened at independent sector treatment centres. Given that he may have forgotten, I must tell him that the Labour party manifesto in 2010, when he was the Secretary of State for Health, stated:

“Foundation trusts will be given the freedom to expand their provision into primary and community care, and to increase their private services—where these are consistent with NHS values”.

That suggests that, as Secretary of State, he was prepared to have in his own party’s manifesto a policy allowing and encouraging foundation trusts to attract more work from the private sector.

This Government’s Health and Social Care Act 2012 specifically prohibits the Secretary of State, Monitor or the NHS Commissioning Board from favouring any type of provider, be they from the NHS, the charitable sector or the independent sector. It does so because this Government understand something that the right hon. Gentleman’s never did—it is not the nature of the provider, but the quality of the outcomes that matters most to patients.