Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Cumberlege Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, I completely support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, but wonder whether what she wants could be achieved—it might be a small step in the right direction in relation to legislation generally—by simply removing from the Bill the words “provided to individuals”. The term “individuals” has a jarring effect. “Provided to people” might sound a bit better, but “individuals” has a slightly impersonal feel, especially as we are concerned as a Committee and as a House about the “national” character of the National Health Service. References to individuals jar in that regard as well. Simply requiring improvement in the provision of services might achieve what the noble Baroness seeks in her amendment.

[Baroness Cumberlege]

My Lords, I should like to ask a few questions about Amendment 10A. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for her introduction, but we do not yet have a precise definition of what she means by area-based populations. All sorts of different services have different catchment areas. At the beginning, the noble Baroness cited family planning services. She said that she felt that perhaps it was a bad example, and I think it probably is because there are so many different services that require different boundaries. I am for coterminosity as far as we can get it, because when I was a regional chairman, I saw that where you had coterminosity between the health service and local government, you could achieve a great deal. That worked well, but when one examined it carefully, it was not so much about the boundaries; it was about the relationships built between different people. That was what made the services work extremely well.

With regard to GP practices, GPs usually want people within their area, especially if they will have to do home visits. I have been in the situation—I am sure that many noble Lords have—where I had an emergency in London but my GP is 52 miles away. That can be coped with; you can still manage that, although it is quite awkward in some respects. My anxiety about allocating patients to different GPs—being neat and tidy and trying to get all the boundaries sorted—is that I do not know what it does for choice. Perhaps the noble Baroness will say something about that. What happens when people want to choose a different GP who is out of their area, which is what we want to do locally but are unable to because the boundaries have been so clearly fixed, I have to say, by the GPs themselves?

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has somewhat stolen my thunder because I had meant to say almost exactly what she said, but I was going to mention it when we got to the part of the Bill describing the clinical commissioning groups. Schedule 2, which relates to clinical commissioning groups, states:

“A clinical commissioning group must have a constitution … The constitution must specify”,

the name, the members and the area of the group. That is there. I would like the noble Earl to describe how that area is to be measured and whether it is to be coterminous with existing boundaries, particularly local authority boundaries, for the very reason given by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay.