Health and Care Bill

Geraint Davies Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

The NHS was established to provide equal rights to healthcare, free at the point of delivery, irrespective of income or personal health. Yet as we emerge from the pandemic in praise of the NHS, this Bill is yet another step towards dismantling and privatising the system.

With the highest vaccination rates, thanks to the NHS, England also has the highest infection rate of the delta variant, thanks to the Government going into lockdown too late and coming out too soon. With 128,000 people dead, 695,000 currently have the covid variant and there are record waiting lists. The Government should be investing in more capacity now—in the workforce and in beds. They should be reinstating the 12,000 empty beds. Instead, the Government are putting £10 billion into the private sector over four years, with the framework contract, when the private sector has only 8,000 beds in total. Doctors will have to leave NHS hospitals to go to private hospitals, further disrupting NHS services.

Coming out of the pandemic, we need a healthcare Bill that re-energises the NHS and rewards our nurses and doctors who saved the country from calamity. Instead, this Bill allows private health companies to sit on boards, deciding where the NHS funding is spent. It allows further outsourcing, opening the door to more taxpayers’ money being siphoned off to the profits of private contractors. The NHS is being fragmented. Talk of patient choice is disingenuous, as funds must be transferred in the internal market, so it is a postcode lottery. There has not been patient choice in England since the internal market was introduced.

In contrast, in Wales, the Labour Government continues with a planned system that has delivered the highest vaccination rate in the world and a 90% effective test, track and isolate system, wholly delivered by the public sector through councils and health authorities. Wales has a lower death rate over a five-year average—13% in Wales vs. 20% in England, despite Wales’s older population. There is public procurement in place of crony contracts to Tory donors.

Wales has shown that public money is used most effectively in the NHS by public sector delivery, so more people are treated equally, irrespective of income and personal health, true to Aneurin Bevan’s founding principles. Instead, the Bill is a back door for United States companies, via trade deals, to further break up our system, on the road to health insurance, which hits the poorest and sickest hardest.

This is a rotten Bill. It is bad for Britain’s health, bad for our wealth and bad for our most treasured achievement —our NHS.