Oral Answers to Questions

David Miliband Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

Yes; my hon. Friend is absolutely right. As we implement our plans for the value-based pricing of medicines from 2014, NICE’s role will change. It will focus on advising how best to use treatments and to develop quality standards for the NHS, rather than recommending whether patients should be able to access particular drugs. We want patients to have access to the medicines that their clinicians believe are best for them.

[David Miliband (South Shields) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the Secretary of State can provide some reassurance to residents of Cleadon Park estate in my constituency who are concerned about the consequences of primary care trust abolition for the PCT-owned, PCT-organised and PCT-financed health centre that brings together primary and secondary care, and local authority and community services. Is there not a real danger of the sort of expensive “anarchy” of which Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics has warned?

[Mr Lansley]

Happily, I can offer the right hon. Gentleman’s constituents great reassurance that not only will the relationship between community health care and specialist health care in hospitals be improved by general practice-led commissioning—because clinicians will speak to clinicians—but the services they rely on will be improved, because we will no longer spend so much money on PCT administration. He will know that in 10 years under his Government the number of managers in the NHS increased by more than 60%.