Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

Like my noble friend I hope that this will not be pressed to a vote because the Government need to do some thinking and should be able to do it between now and Report. Ultimately, that depends on the reaction to what he says and whether we can have some hope that these issues will now be thought through and modifications made if necessary before we come back to this.

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, apart from the postgraduate dean amendments, the rest of the amendments in this group in effect fall into the category that one might call “Stop the Bill, I want to get off”. They would all fundamentally change the Bill; they would ruin it. None of them is a serious proposition. You cannot go from one system to another without radical change, but the arguments that I have heard about these amendments seem to be the same arguments that I have heard about preventing any change in the National Health Service.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, says, “No, we can’t do it now because it’s too expensive and we have to save £20 billion”. I suggest that it is not the £20 billion that we need to worry about; it is the increased costs that will continue to accrue through the changing demographics and changing technology over the next 20 to 30 years. If we continue to use the same direct management system, with its intermediate and many tiered system that we have used for the past 50 to 60 years, we will never address the challenges. All we will do is have a meagre, minor, reduced NHS of the same sort that we have now. We will have less and will not adapt and create something better. I am very much in favour of moving away from the direct management system with its so-called intermediate tiers, which I have served on as best I could over many years, to an independent regulator system where the providers at least are freed up and the commissioners, with the clinicians in charge, have the freedom to think about what they need to shape this service.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newton, that the transition pathway in certain areas still needs to be clearly set out. We have had a clear indication of how that will work. Nevertheless, it is not all finalised. At this stage in the passage of a Bill, my experience is that things are put into place. That was certainly so in 1990 with the working on the patients’ transition and the other transitions that were put into place by the Labour Party. There were arguments in this Chamber and the other place about the fact that everything was being set up. Proleptic appointments and the transition of structures were being made—heavens, it would have been improper if they were not. The fact that some of these changes are happening is very helpful.

The centred primary care trusts and strategic health authorities have been mentioned before. Is it not strange that two to three years ago nobody could wait to get rid of them because they were not performing very well? I agree that they have improved. Nevertheless they have not proved to be that helpful structurally, as they have become extremely bureaucratic and have not performed as well as we had hoped. To the noble Lord, Lord Rea, I would say that the speech made by the noble Earl some time ago could be repeated word for word today because there will be no private commissioning. There will be public sector commissioning that is supported in some instances only by the expertise of the private sector, which the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said is often very useful in these circumstances. I hope that the noble Earl will be able to reassure him about that.

It seems to me that if we want to create a new system—which I think we must, because the NHS cannot continue as it is at the moment—we will need some very serious structural changes. We need to progress and move on as quickly as we are doing now to get the SHAs and PCTs out of the way in an orderly fashion and to get the new structures for a new sort of regulated system in place.