Health Bill

Brian Mathew Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

All of us want to see a better NHS, but there is a profound contradiction at the heart of the Bill: the Government are handing ICBs more responsibility and authority with one hand while cutting them off at the knees with the other. ICBs are being merged, clustered and completely reorganised with no idea of what the landscape will look like in six months, let alone six years down the line.

In my constituency, the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICB is cutting 50% of its staff. In the midst of this, HCRG Care Group, a private equity-owned provider, has taken over essentially all community health contracts. It has arrived with a rapid programme of change, new technology and frontline staffing cuts, promising efficiency and ease of access, yet patients are facing new barriers, unanswered calls and a mounting backlog of referrals. The ICB is supposed to be overseeing and scrutinising all this while running at half capacity, mid reorganisation, with its own future uncertain. Can the Government assure us that no patient will be lost in the shuffle?

On the subject of robust scrutiny and oversight of our health services, I am alarmed at the proposed abolition of Healthwatch, which has been an independent champion of our patient care for more than a decade. Part of its function will be transferred to ICBs, to add to their ever-growing list of responsibilities. My late friend Anne Keat, a long-serving Healthwatch member, would be highly concerned at the prospect of the NHS being given the role of marking its own homework. Independent scrutiny is vital and healthy for the future of our NHS. Will the Secretary of State please reconsider this element of the Bill?