NHS: Hospitals

Baroness Wall of New Barnet Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, it is clear that one of the causes was that the previous Government—for all the right reasons, I have to say—injected very large sums of additional money into the health service, but alongside that there was no commensurate increase in activity. A lot of the additional money went into settling pay claims. That is not to decry the many benefits that arose from the additional money, but the net effect was a decline in productivity.

[Baroness Wall of New Barnet]

Does the Minister agree that there are dangers in sweeping statements on how NHS hospitals perform and that they perform badly, because that is not the case? In many instances, not just in my own hospital—Barnet and Chase Farm—the improvement in hospital services over the past years has been incredible. Does he also agree that there are already strong and widespread relationships with the private sector in NHS hospitals and that the challenge is for NHS hospitals to be better than private hospitals so that people will choose to go to their local hospital?

[Earl Howe]

The noble Baroness is right to pull me up. If I implied that the NHS was across the board providing a lower standard of care than the private sector, I apologise because that is certainly not the case. There are some shining examples of care delivered by the NHS. However, as she will know, not all hospital trusts are as good as hers. Some give us cause for concern in a clinical sense, and they need to be challenged sometimes on the way they look at quality. That is going on at the moment with the quality, innovation, productivity and prevention programme that she will know very well.