Health and Social Care Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Members shout “Scaremongering” from the Government Benches, but the Government will not publish the evidence to back up their claims. We have read the local and regional risk registers which warn precisely of the case that my hon. Friend mentions—of damage to the continuity of care, risks to patient safety, longer waits for cancer patients, risks to child safeguarding. Those are the facts in the regional risk registers and they are the facts that Ministers are trying to withhold from the public.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman share my surprise and sadness that the Liberal Democrats, who were once the defenders of freedom of information, are now trooping through the Lobby in support of a dangerous Bill shrouded and protected by the restriction of information?

[Andy Burnham]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point. The Liberal Democrats once derided the Freedom of Information Act as too weak. Today they cower behind it, trying to use any scrap of protection they can find within it to prevent the publication of the information that patients and the public deserve to have. That says everything that people need to know about today’s Liberal Democrat party.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), for whom I have great respect. I am glad that she recognises that the risk register should be published, and I greatly regret the fact that her Whips did not allow her on to the Bill Committee, where her views might have had more influence. However, I think that the coalition insults those of us who oppose the Bill by suggesting that we would mistake a worst-case scenario for a prediction. I think that opponents of the Bill know what a risk looks like, and I think that we could be trusted with the risk register. We want to be able to study the Bill with the benefit of that information, and to be able to represent our constituents properly on it.

This is a very sad day for our health service. Although the Bill returns to the Commons today following a tangle of more than 1,000 amendments, the Government have done little to alter its direction, which remains fixed on the ideology of driving commercialisation into almost every corner of the NHS. [Hon. Members: “Have you read it?” ] Yes, I have.

The risks were made plain at the weekend. Dramatic warnings by leading doctors featured in an assessment by the Faculty of Public Health, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris). It has also read the Bill, and it represents more than 3,000 public health specialists in the NHS as well as local councils and academia. It says that the Bill poses

“significant risks… to patients and the general public”.

It goes on to say that the Bill could well damage people’s health and experience of care—[Interruption.]—and adds:

“It is likely that the most vulnerable who already suffer the worst health outcomes will be disadvantaged as a result of the enactment of the Bill.”

Let me repeat that. Members may not have been able to hear it over all their heckling. The poorest,

“the most vulnerable who already suffer the worst health outcomes will be disadvantaged as a result of the enactment of the Bill.”

That is precisely the point. That is why an extraordinarily wide cross-section of people are deeply concerned about the commercialisation that the Bill brings. Yet despite their concern, and despite two rulings demanding the release of the risk register, the Government maintain their arrogant dismissal and refuse to make the register public. Why? Because they know that were they to make it public, we would know what they already know, which is that it drives a nail into the coffin of the NHS. The Bill is hugely damaging, and that refusal to come clean speaks volumes.

So many parts of the Bill are still hugely flawed. The 49% private income cap and the fact that more and more beds will be used for the private sector will massively undermine our NHS. That is why so many constituents are writing to us: they are deeply concerned. However, this is not the end of the road, because the campaigning will continue throughout the country.