NHS (Private Sector)

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My argument would be that if those decisions are to be made, the people who make them should be accountable to the hon. Gentleman and the House, whereas the Bill that his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is introducing proposes to push those things away. There will be an independent commissioning board that GPs and clinical commissioning groups will not be able to overturn; it will make the decisions. That is a completely unacceptable state of affairs.

Before the last election, we proposed a modest loosening of the private patient cap in response to pressure in another place when we were debating the Health Act 2009, but compared with our modest reforms, the Government’s plans are off the scale. Instead of private sector activity at the margins, the Health and Social Care Bill places market forces at the heart of the system. The private sector will not support the NHS, but will replace large chunks of the service in commissioning and provision.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I should be interested to learn—as I am sure would the whole House—the right hon. Gentleman’s definition of modest loosening. In the four years between 2006 and 2010, the amount of money going to the private sector rose from £2 billion to about £12.2 billion. Does the right hon. Gentleman simply oppose the 49% cap or will he pledge to reverse it if he returns to government? What exactly would the cap be? Would it be 30% or 12%? Please let us know.

[Andy Burnham]

May I refer the hon. Gentleman to the motion? Its request to the Government is not unreasonable; it asks them “to revise significantly downwards” the cap they have proposed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

The NHS is rightly the most valued institution in this country. It has an impeccable track record of continuing improvement and innovation going back more than 60 years. The staff on the front line and those in the support services who are disparaged by Conservative Members as somehow irrelevant to the success of the service have never been frightened to face up to the challenges of change. They are, however, sick and tired of the constant demands of know-it-all politicians on all sides for endless reorganisations, restructuring and re-profiling. That is why they were so disappointed after the Prime Minister had told them that there would be no more top-down impositions from on high; they and the British public were, quite simply, misled.

The fears around privatisation are a reflection of yet another change to the structure of the NHS, and it is a very unwelcome one. The Secretary of State tried to rubbish the trade unions tonight. He did not mention all the other professional bodies in the NHS that are opposed to the changes. The only people who seem to be in favour of them are those in the Tory party, and their friends in the Liberal Democrats. None of the people who are delivering the services want the changes to happen. That includes the GPs that the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) was talking about. They might well be doing good work in Crawley, but the key is that they do not want to have to do it in that way. The general public are also worried about the changes.

The Secretary of State said that we should not look back, but if we do not learn the mistakes of history, we will repeat them. We need to look at the situation that prevailed a long time ago. The working people in this country in the first half of the last century were desperate for a health care system. People came back from the devastation of world war one to a worldwide influenza epidemic. They were living in desperate conditions and working in massively unsafe workplaces. They were bringing up families whose lives were blighted and shortened by the diseases of poverty: tuberculosis, rickets, malnutrition and pneumonia. Their conditions of life at home and at work had changed little since the days of Dickens, yet we saw yet another world war where money that could not be found to build a decent society in peacetime was miraculously produced to kill millions in wartime.

At the end of that war, the men and women of this country were determined not to continue with that and were not going to put their faith in a Government and a private sector-driven economy that had failed them so badly. They turned instead to a Government who, despite the biggest debt crisis ever, determined that the health and well-being of this country’s people was paramount. That is why Labour built millions of homes for people, why swathes of industries that had been disgracefully run down by the private sector owners were nationalised, and why we, the Labour party, built the NHS to ensure that never again would the quality of a person’s health care depend on the depth of their wallets.

People quite rightly felt bitter about the way they had been treated for decades. That was perhaps best summed up by Nye Bevan, who set up the NHS, when on 4 July 1948, two days before the NHS came into being, he said:

“no amount of cajolery and no attempts at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me.”

As expected, the Opposition did not like that, and Mr Churchill labelled Mr Bevan “the Minister for Disease”. Equally as expected, Nye Bevan was having none of it. Speaking from the platform of the Durham miners’ gala, he reminded people of the reality of life under Tory rule when he said—

[Chris Skidmore]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Anderson]

Go on, then.

[Chris Skidmore]

The hon. Gentleman is quoting history, so I wonder whether he would agree that Nye Bevan could be seen as the pioneer of private sector involvement within the NHS, given that he accepted that more than 4,000 pay beds should be part of the NHS in order to ensure bags of investment in facilities?

[Mr Anderson]

Of course, the reality is as envisaged by my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State, who has accepted that there is a role for the private sector within the health service, but the debate is about how big it should be and how much control there should be of the health sector. [Interruption.] May I carry on?

As I was saying, Nye Bevan responded to Churchill’s criticism by saying:

“Who should be called the Minister for Disease? I am keeping mothers and children alive when he half starved them to death.”

That is the legacy with which the Conservative party is lumbered. It is the burden round the neck of Conservative Members when the people of this country get worried about private involvement in health care. I have no doubt that Conservative Members will not agree with me, but it was right and proper when my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) drew an analogy between this privatisation and that of the utilities. We should look at the results of those privatisations: unfettered and uncontrolled expansion, with our energy supplies now controlled by foreign companies; huge, uncontrolled price increases; millions of people in fuel poverty; no control over the security of supply; a national grid not fit for purpose; and an incoherent strategy to face up to the challenge of climate change. Those are all the result of giving away our vital services to the highest bidder. People are quite right to say, “Why would it be any different in health?”

The people of this country do not want the NHS to become a copycat version of the American model—a model that costs twice as much as ours to run, yet leaves 20% of the population out in the cold when they are ill. Our NHS has a tremendous track record, dealing with millions of people every week. Our life expectancy levels have risen rapidly, especially over the period when the previous Government reversed the years of underfunding that were the trademark of the last Tory Government. Public satisfaction rates were at record levels when we left office 18 months ago.

This present Government have broken their promise to the British people. They have lied to the staff who work magnificently to deliver our NHS. They are intent on breaking up the NHS and replacing it with a system based once again on a programme that puts profits before patients. If Conservative Members really believe in privatisation, they should ask the people what they want. The people have woken up to the reality of the Conservative party; they realise that once again the NHS is not safe in Tory hands—even though they are wearing the yellow gloves provided by the Liberal Democrats. Patients, as the figures clearly show, want no further privatisation of our NHS.