NHS Risk Register Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Grahame Morris
Main Page: Grahame Morris (Labour - Easington)Department Debates - View all Grahame Morris's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(12 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Lansley
I am sorry, but unlike the shadow Secretary of State I have taken a lot of interventions. I will take more before I finish, but I need to say one or two things without trespassing too much on Back Benchers’ time.
The shadow Secretary of State does not really have anything of substance to talk about, so he wants to talk about the risk register. Let me tell him about our approach to transparency. We are international leaders in openness and transparency in government. Across government, we publish business plans, departmental staffing and salaries, full details of departmental contracts and summaries of departmental board meetings. We are legislating for foundation trust boards to meet in public, which the Labour Government never did; they resisted it. We are opening up the workings of government in ways that Labour rejected outright.
We have set our sights higher than that. In the NHS, we have opened up more information about services than was ever done under the last Government, shining a light on poor performance and promoting better performance. The NHS atlas of variation has been published for the first time, exposing the variation in outcomes for patients in different parts of the country. That was covered up by Labour, which would have said, “Oh, no, that’s the postcode lottery, we mustn’t publish that information.” We have set it out, because that is the route to improving performance.
I remember the shadow Secretary of State’s predecessors as Health Secretary going on the “Today” programme and saying, “Oh, no, nobody’s in mixed-sex accommodation any more. We’ve eliminated all that.” Well, we have published data on that for the first time, showing that 12,000 patients a month were being put into mixed-sex accommodation. Now, because we published those data and acted, that figure has come down by 95% since December 2010. The previous Government covered that information up; we are publishing and dealing with it.
Mr Lansley
I bow to my hon. Friend on the procedures under the Freedom of Information Act. We have made it very clear that we are proceeding as the Act provides, as the Information Commissioner himself set out. I want to make it clear to the House that there is no information that it would be proper for the other place to have access to when considering the legislation, that it does not already have access to. The tribunal will be an opportunity not for politicians but for the likes of Lord O’Donnell, the former head of the home civil service, to set out clearly the process by which the free and frank expression of advice to Ministers in policy development needs to be protected under the Act.
I will tell the House about some of the risks that the NHS faced. It faced risks relating to the £67 billion private finance initiative repayment bill left to us by the right hon. Gentleman. He talks about hospitals being under threat, but we have had to offer exceptional financial support to seven hospitals to help them to back up their PFIs. Members might be interested to know that when I announced that decision on 3 February—just a fortnight or so ago—the shadow Secretary of State, who puts his view of these things on Twitter, wrote:
“I didn’t sign them off.”
He did not even use 140 characters. He managed it in even fewer. He said he didn’t sign them off—but oh yes, he did. What about Whiston hospital in St Helens and Knowsley? He signed that off. It is a pathetic attempt to escape responsibility for leaving the NHS in debt. [Interruption.] Oh, he is blaming his junior Minister now. It had nothing to do with him! When he refused to release the departmental risk register back in 2009, did he do that, or is he going to blame one of his junior Ministers? I have such excellent Ministers that I will never have to blame them for anything, but frankly I would never attempt to do so, and I hope they know that.
Mr Lansley
No.
The NHS faced the serious risk under Labour of declining productivity, as has been so powerfully illustrated. Labour turned a blind eye to inefficiency. The reason why we have to plug a £20 billion productivity black hole in the NHS is that Labour let productivity fall year on year before the election. We are pushing productivity up, and already efficiency gains of £7 billion have been delivered.
Mr Lansley
No.
I asked, “How much money has the Department of Health spent on contracts with McKinsey since the election?” The answer is £390,000. Well, I know McKinsey well enough from the past to know that we do not get an awful lot of advice for £390,000.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
May I start by placing on the record my appreciation for all the staff who work in the national health service? I also want to make a declaration, unashamedly, that I love the NHS and will campaign tooth and nail to prevent any fragmentation, privatisation or postcode lottery or any diminution in the service to patients.
I tabled early-day motion 2659 calling on the Health Secretary
“to respect the ruling by the Information Commissioner and to publish the risk register associated with the Health and Social Care Bill reforms in advance of Report Stage in the House of Lords”
so as to inform that debate. The motion we are debating in today’s important debate echoes the wording in my early-day motion, which almost 100 people have signed, including 15 Lib Dem MPs at the last count. I hope they will back up their signature with their vote in the Lobby today. Many Members on both sides of the House have received letters about this issue and there has been an e-petition from 38 Degrees, which has had tremendous support in very few days. In case Government Members need any encouragement, let me refer to a poll from this week showing that 70% of Lib Dem supporters trust NHS professionals more than the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary on the Health and Social Care Bill.
Grahame M. Morris
Most of the health care professionals—indeed 90%; the ones who were not invited to the summit—oppose the changes in one form or other. Also, 80% of Lib Dem voters want the risk register published—an even bigger percentage than that of Labour voters.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree with the Secretary of State about the huge support for the Government from GPs over these reforms?
Grahame M. Morris
A number of Members on the Government Benches have referred, in Health questions and at other times, to the huge support among clinicians and GPs in their area, but Clare Gerada, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, has said that just because GPs are compelled to man the lifeboats does not mean they agree with the sinking of the ship. That sums things up.
Hon. Members on the Government Benches should be particularly concerned by some recent polling figures. According to a poll by ICM, the over-65s—the category of people who are most likely to use the NHS and most likely to vote—want to drop the Bill by a margin of 56% to 29%, or two to one, which is the largest such margin. Sadly, not one Conservative Member, as far as I am aware, has had the courage to sign the early-day motion or to call publicly on the Health Secretary to publish the risk assessment. I know that, privately at least, some of the more thoughtful Conservative Members have been advising the Secretary of State to publish, but he seems to be flatly ignoring them. The risk register contains an objective list of the Department’s view of the risks, an estimation of the likelihood of each specific risk occurring and an estimation of its severity if it did occur. To be clear, what the Health Secretary is determined to conceal are the severe and likely risks of his own reckless attack on the NHS.
The Prime Minister must also be held to account for his broken promises on the NHS, for allowing his Health Secretary to put the NHS at risk and for standing by him while he tries to cover up the mess that is the Health and Social Care Bill. I remind the House that the coalition agreement that was signed by the Government parties stated:
“The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account.”
How does that statement square with this decision? Where is the accountability now? No one in the country voted for these health reforms, the Health and Social Care Bill has no mandate and we in the House will be asked to vote on reforms in the knowledge that the Department of Health and the Health Secretary are complicit in hiding the associated risks.
Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Grahame M. Morris
I am only going to give way twice, so I shall give way to the hon. Lady.
Charlotte Leslie
That is very kind; I thank the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that if we want to debate the health reforms, this is not the place to do it because we are talking about the risk register? Also, does he agree that all this is slightly disingenuous because Governments do not publish risk registers for good reasons, in that it would be far more risky for patients, whom we should all be considering, if Government Departments could not have frank and open discussions? The risks we should really be looking at are those to patients.
Grahame M. Morris
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but if she had been present for the whole debate, she would know that we have covered much of that in discussing the nature of a fundamental change—the biggest ever shake-up—in the national health service since it was established. We are not calling for the nationalisation of the railways or the abolition of the House of Lords. We are simply calling for the risk register to be published, in the interests of openness and transparency, to identify the risks associated with the changes proposed by the Government.
The changes are a matter of the most serious consequence. If the Health Secretary is suppressing a report that shows that the reforms could put patients at risk and worsen the functioning of the NHS—if that is in the report, which I do not know, as I have not seen the strategic risk register, at least the national one—he would be guilty of the biggest political cover-up in a generation.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) mentioned, in his ruling back in November the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said of the Secretary of State’s reasoning:
“Disclosure would significantly aid public understanding of risks related to the proposed reforms and it would also inform participation in the debate about the reforms.”
But almost three months on, we as parliamentarians are still being kept in the dark. We were told that releasing the risk register would jeopardise the success of the policy, but the Information Commissioner refuted that and said it would only enhance the quality of the debate and allow for greater scrutiny of the policy.
We were then told by Ministers that they had published the relevant risks associated with the reforms in the impact assessment. If that was the case, why would the Information Commissioner rule that they should be published to inform debate and why would the Health Secretary fight tooth and nail to prevent that?
Finally, we were told that publication would risk the frankness of future risk registers, another point that the Information Commissioner specifically ruled out. Before the general election, the Conservatives promised to “unleash an information revolution” in the NHS, yet in government they are giving us the biggest cover-up in the history of the NHS. The Prime Minister once described his priorities in three letters: NHS. So we should not be shocked by the professional and public outcry of “OMG!” since he has broken his promise of
“no more top-down reorganisation”
and deployed WMD—weapons of mass deception—to conceal the true nature of his reforms.
Opposition Members know the dangers for the future of the NHS with up to 49% of work carried out in NHS hospitals being done by the private sector, and every service provided by the NHS, whether it be radiotherapy or speech therapy, put out for competitive tender, making it vulnerable to private sector takeover. It is no wonder we are debating the threat to the NHS when so many pre-election promises have been broken.
I conclude by offering some advice to the Health Secretary. I leave him with this thought: history is littered with examples of people who have fallen from grace, not for their crimes, but for the cover-up. He should end his terrible attack on the NHS and have the courage to be open about his plans to fragment and privatise our beloved national health service.