NHS: Shared Business Services

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I will answer the noble Lord’s four questions. The first was on taking advice from officials. I think the noble Lord would probably be alarmed if the Secretary of State was not taking advice from officials. That should be welcomed. It is clearly the case that he was thinking on his own, because he took the decision to follow that advice in the first instance in March, but was of the view by July that enough was known and that it was important to update Parliament before recess.

The second question was about the timing of the Statement. The noble Lord will remember that summer 2016 was a reasonably busy period after the EU referendum. The main point here is that the Statement was made before recess and was not held back until the autumn. As regards NHS Shared Business Services and the consequences for it, those consequences have been severe: it no longer has this contract and will, as my right honourable friend confirmed in another place just now, pay its share of the costs.

Finally, as my right honourable friend said, it could appear that there was a potential for conflict of interest, but in his view there was not one, because at all times—as confirmed in the NAO report—patient safety was the driving force behind the actions of the department and NHS England. It will always be the case, whatever arrangements the department has with an ALB—whether a standard agency, a joint company or whatever it is—that patient safety must come first. That was confirmed in the NAO report today.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, as I understand it, that Statement on the last day of term before the Summer Recess last year was one of 30—which implies to me that the Government consider the last day of term to be a very good day to hide bad news.

The Minister suggests that the company, or its shareholders, will have to pay its share of the costs of investigating this scandal. Can he assure us that the NHS will not be out of pocket, particularly in the light of the fact that the loss is not just financial? A lot of doctors and various officials, in both the department and trusts, have had to spend a great deal of their time looking into this—and, of course, time is money. Will this scandal actually cause the Government to be a little more cautious in future when they claim that putting health services out to private companies always gives better value to the taxpayer and the NHS?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness will know that I was not in post at the end of last summer, so I cannot explain why there were the number of Statements that there were. I know that Governments of perhaps different hues have also tended to put out Written Statements, so I do not think any political party is entirely innocent in this regard. The point is that the information was made available to Parliament.

On the point about cost settlement, there are interested parties here and the costs need to be settled once we have got to the bottom of exactly what has happened and once those inquiries and indeed the investigations into the potential for patient harm have been settled. I underline that as yet no instances of patient harm have been discovered.

Finally, the point about privatisation is quite an important one. The noble Baroness will know that the private sector is involved in the delivery of all parts of the NHS. Breach of contract, which is what this is, and the covering up of mistakes happen in all parts of the health service—public, private, shared and all the rest of it. It is not a case of “private sector bad, public sector good”: we know that from instances like Mid Staffs and so on. The core point is that we need very strong data security standards, and that is why the Government will be responding in due course to the Caldicott review and the review of these issues by the CQC.

Brexit: Nursing Staff

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I am afraid the noble Lord is mistaking cause for correlation in this instance, and let me explain why we think that is the case. The General Pharmaceutical Council introduced language testing in November 2016; it had experienced no significant drop-off in applications from EEA member countries after Brexit but before that point and a big downturn in applications after that point. So it is language testing; it also happened with the GMC as well when it introduced language testing. I know this is something that the noble Lord supports—he said as much in a debate on this very issue in 2015—because it is an issue of safety. That is why language testing has been introduced. I would like to say, however, that of course we value the work of EU staff who come here, and, indeed, all nursing staff. As the Prime Minister set out yesterday, we want them to stay and have offered a generous package to allow them to do so, and there are more EU nurses here than there ever have been.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, the Department of Health’s own modelling predicts that there will be a shortage of 40,000 nurses by 2026. My own local hospital has 60 nurse vacancies, and I am sure other noble Lords have similar examples. What do the Government propose to do to avoid the NHS becoming unsafe because of these nursing shortages, given that some nurses are already being asked to stay on at the end of 12-hour shifts in order to fill gaps in the roster?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving us the opportunity to talk about the fact that we have increased the number of nurses and health visitors by nearly 5,000 since 2010. She is quite right to say that we need more of them; we have a growing and ageing population and higher expectations of what the NHS should be delivering. It is for that reason that we have a number of things in action: we have 52,000 nurses in training; we have a return to practice programme, which has already prepared 2,000 nurses to come back into the profession; and we are introducing nursing apprenticeships and nursing associates. We are not complacent about this issue—we know it is important—but there are a number of programmes in train to fill the gap that she has identified.