Oral Answers to Questions
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
5. What steps the Government are taking to help people cope with conditions such as diabetes and asthma.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
We are working on an outcomes strategy for long-term conditions such as diabetes and asthma structured around six shared goals, early diagnosis, integrated care, promoting independence, and steps to support those with long-term conditions to live as well as possible.
Christopher Pincher
Given that type 1 diabetes in under-fives is growing at 5% each year, what can my right hon. Friend do with the innovative Secretary of State for Education to ensure that nursery and primary school staff have the right skills and knowledge to ensure that they can help young children to cope with type 1?
Mr Hunt
The answer is that we are doing quite a lot—a good booklet, “Managing Medicines in Schools and Early Years Settings”, goes around schools, and there are other resources for schools—but we need to do more. We will be announcing a diabetes action plan, a long-term conditions outcomes strategy and a cardiovascular disease outcomes strategy, which will go further to address the issues that my hon. Friend raises.
Health and Social Care Bill
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr Lansley
As I understand it, I have come to the House to answer questions about a letter, jointly signed by the Deputy Prime Minister and Baroness Shirley Williams, which does not say that.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
In 2007, when he was Secretary of State, the shadow Secretary of State waxed eloquent, saying that he celebrated the private sector in the NHS. Has my right hon. Friend any clue to what changed the right hon. Gentleman’s mind?
NHS Risk Register
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Andy Burnham
No, the House will listen to this information.
What do the risk registers say about patient and public safety and about staffing levels? South Central strategic health authority’s risk register warns—
Andy Burnham
The hon. Gentleman would do well to listen—[Interruption.] I have taken interventions, and he would do well to listen. I am trying to get through my remarks so that colleagues can speak. He should try listening for once. He is not doing a very good job of it at the moment.
South Central strategic health authority warns of a
“risk that the pace and scale of reform, if coupled with savings achieved through cost reduction rather than real service redesign, could adversely impact on safety and quality, with the system failing to learn the lessons from Mid Staffordshire and Winterbourne View.”
NHS London warns:
“There is a risk that women may be exposed to unsafe services which could cause them harm.”
NHS Northamptonshire and NHS Milton Keynes warn that
“failure to deliver national objectives, business continuity and statutory functions due to lack of capacity, capability, retention and availability across the workforce resulting from the proposed Health and Social Care Bill.”
Those are risks created by the Secretary of State and his Bill. It is utterly disgraceful.
Reform of Social Care
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(12 years, 12 months ago)
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Mr Lansley
We have made specific additional provision to support respite care. I hope that people will be given more independence and support at home not only as a result of NHS support—the £648 million that will be provided this year is a great deal of money, which will substantially increase access to such facilities as community equipment, home adaptations, reablement and rehabilitation —but through, for instance, telehealth, which I mentioned in response to an earlier question. I think that we can transform the quality of care and health services provided at home.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
Because Haunton Hall nursing home in Tamworth is owned by Southern Cross, its fate is of grave concern to residents and their families. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that any advice he receives from the regulator about companies such as Southern Cross, which the Labour party unfortunately ignored, will not go unheeded by him?
Mr Lansley
In the past, Governments received advice from the regulator about the desirability of their being able to undertake proper scrutiny of the financial circumstances—the financial viability and sustainability—of organisations. No powers in that regard have been taken in the past, but we are seeking such powers in the Health and Social Care Bill, and one of the debates that we will need to have concerns the extent to which it will be right for us to use them in the future.
NHS Future Forum
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Mr Lansley
No, I have said that we will legislate to ensure a level playing field, so her constituents should have access to whichever provider their clinical commissioning group views as best able to deliver quality care.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
The Government are incorporating the co-operation and competition panel into Monitor to advise the NHS on competition rules. Given that the Opposition seem to be engaged in collective amnesia this afternoon, will my right hon. Friend remind the House which party first established the CCP and the concept of competition in the NHS?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, because, as the Future Forum report acknowledges, the Bill does not extend the application of competition rules in the NHS, which were introduced under the Labour Government. The co-operation and competition panel was established under the Labour Government in 2009. The rules that we will maintain as a process of evolution, rather than revolution, are the ones that were consulted on in January 2009 and most recently published by a Labour Government in March 2010. To that extent, and despite all the hot air from the Labour party on competition in the NHS, we are adopting an evolutionary approach and starting precisely from the situation that applied under the Labour Government.
Future of the NHS
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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John Healey
There is nothing wrong with the general aims of the changes, but what the Government are doing is different from what they are saying. In one third of the legislation, they are not setting up GP consortia or reducing bureaucracy in the NHS, but setting up the NHS as a full-blown market. That is the wrong prescription for our NHS, and it is patients who will suffer.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman seems to be suffering from amnesia, which, by the way, is treatable on the NHS. On 30 November, he said that he supported our proposals to move public health functions from primary care trusts to local authorities. If he does not believe in reorganisation any more, how does he intend to achieve that move?
John Healey
In principle, that is a good move. The Opposition, including those of us on the Front Bench, have said that it makes sense in principle to give local authorities a lead responsibility on public health; after all, they are responsible for things that affect public health such as housing, employment and a good environment. The Government’s failure is that local authorities are not getting the powers or resources to do the job properly. The provisions in the Bill will fragment the NHS and make it harder, not easier, for them to do that job.
NHS Reorganisation
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Karl Turner
Not at the moment.
The Government Front-Bench team and its Lib Dem colleagues can argue against what I say until they are blue in the face, but we know what the reality is. The chief executive of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, says:
“The scale of the change is enormous—beyond anything that anybody from the public or private sector has witnessed”.
When we bear in mind the context of the plans, the destruction to the NHS becomes very apparent. The plans are to be implemented at a time when the NHS is to make £20 billion in efficiency savings. This is a costly, unnecessary and reckless top-down reorganisation of the NHS, and it is without any real mandate. The coalition agreement clearly states that the new Government will stop the top-down reorganisation of the NHS. Instead, we are faced with a reorganisation that is described as being so big
“you can see it from space.”
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman seems to favour top-down organisation of the NHS. Does he agree with his party’s shadow Health Minister, the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who said:
“Many staff are disillusioned and disempowered by the top-down target driven approach that has dominated much of the last decade of health policy”—
his party’s policy?
Karl Turner
I am well aware of my hon. Friend’s remarks, and they were made in a very different context, but let us listen to the BMA. Yesterday, it held its first extraordinary meeting for 20 years. Interestingly, it has convened two emergency meetings in the past 20 years, both of them under a Tory Government. It is the same old Tory story: they cannot be trusted with the NHS.
The most damaging part of these plans is the competition aspect. The Secretary of State’s smokescreen about GP commissioning is designed simply to divert attention from the underlying plans, which are, as Baroness Williams has said, privatisation by stealth, and Professor Ham of the King’s Fund correctly asserts that the commissioning reforms
“are of secondary importance compared with the radical extension of competition”.
The Health and Social Care Bill brings the NHS within the remit of competition law for the first time, and Monitor, the new economic regulator, will be instructed actively to promote competition under clause 52. Placing a statutory obligation on Monitor to enforce competition creates a situation in which commissioners will not be able to act in the best interests of their patients, for fear of a costly legal challenge lurking in the shadows.
The Government’s approach to Monitor demonstrates how ill thought out these plans are. In a clamour to roll back the state and win favour with the private health companies that have bankrolled their party, the Government’s plans to introduce competition into the NHS will work against the integrated networks needed to ensure that the long-term ill receive the services they need and are entitled to.
The most worrying aspect of this policy is that the Government have ignored expert criticism—or, indeed, criticism of any kind. The divide is pretty stark. On one side there is the BMA, A National Voice, the Royal College of Nursing, the Stroke Association, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Foundation Trust Network, the Royal Society of GPs, and, since the weekend, the Lib Dems. On the other side, there is the Secretary of State and the private health companies, who are bound to be rubbing their hands, waiting expectantly for their investment in him and his party to pay off.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
Over Christmas, I found myself using the services of the Royal Hallamshire hospital in Sheffield for emergency eye surgery. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the staff there, who saved the sight in my left eye, which is, as hon. Members might imagine, important to me. That procedure was routine for those staff—something that they did day in, day out. The whole experience—the quick diagnosis, emergency admission, successful operation and supportive aftercare—brought home to me the importance of having a national health service that is not only free at the point of delivery but available equally to all and with the capacity to meet the health care needs of our people. Let me contrast it with the system in the United States, where the quality and speed of treatment depends on patients’ ability to pay. Incidentally, the American system costs the public purse more. I know that some Conservative parliamentarians look at that system with enthusiasm. Many of us will recall Daniel Hannan campaigning against President Obama’s health reforms and describing the NHS as a 60-year old mistake, so it is not surprising that the majority of people in this country do not trust this Government with the NHS. When Government Members talk about monopolies, the people of this country see a public service.
Christopher Pincher
The hon. Gentleman talks about Government Members, but he might note that, other than those on the Front Bench, there are only 11 Members on the Opposition Benches for their Opposition day debate. On the Government side there are more than double that number. Does that not bear eloquent testimony to who really cares about the NHS?
Paul Blomfield
What bears eloquent testimony to who really cares about the NHS is our record. Before 1997, I remember patients being stacked up in hospital corridors in Sheffield every winter because the hospitals could not find beds. That situation has been transformed under Labour over the past 13 years.
The Prime Minister has tried hard to reassure the public that the NHS is safe in Tory hands, but he has failed. In January, a major survey of the British public demonstrated that only 27% of people back moves to allow profit-making companies to increase their role in the NHS. That reflects the way in which our people treasure the NHS and its values, and that is why the Government did not have the confidence to say at the general election what their real intention was: the deconstruction and privatisation of the NHS by stealth.
It is not only the public whom the Prime Minister has failed to convince. The Secretary of State told us again today, as the Government have done many times during discourse on the issue, that we should trust doctors—those who understand the NHS.
Oral Answers to Questions
Christopher Pincher Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
8. What recent progress he has made in introducing GP commissioning consortia.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
11. What recent progress he has made in introducing GP commissioning consortia.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
Last week, I announced the second wave of GP-led pathfinder consortia. There are now 141 groups of GP practices piloting the future GP commissioning arrangements. Those groups are made up of more than 4,000 GP practices, with over half the population starting to benefit from services that better meet their needs and improve outcomes for patients. The Health and Social Care Bill, which had its First Reading last week, sets out the legislative framework that supports our reforms.
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend might like to speak to general practitioners in Redbridge in London who, as a pathfinder consortium, have been pioneering GP-led commissioning for 18 months. They have redesigned care for patients with diabetes and coronary artery disease, and are shifting care in ophthalmology and dermatology to primary care settings. They are demonstrating how this form of locally and clinically-led commissioning is more responsive to patients and more effective.
Christopher Pincher
As we shift from PCTs commissioning services to GP consortia doing so, can my right hon. Friend confirm that the important work done by pharmacies, such as providing anti-smoking clinics and the supervised consumption of drug substitutes, will not be left out in the cold?