Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

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—