National Health Service Bill

Jamie Reed Excerpts

Friday 11th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

No, I will not. I will not give way to a gentleman who has spent about two hours boring on this morning.

The private sector is profiting from NHS training, but it is depriving the NHS of income and removing valuable day-to-day training experience. Let us take the example of a surgeon who no longer gets to practise on scheduled elective work and who, as a result, has to refer an emergency shoulder injury to a specialist unit. It could have been dealt with at a lower level, but the experience and practice were lost.

[Mr Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this Bill forward. In communities such as mine, in Whitehaven, Millom, Keswick, Maryport, Workington and elsewhere, we are really feeling the effect of Government policy right now—there are no two ways about it—as it is hollowing out the NHS. The Bill requires a lot of work, and I do not favour another reorganisation. Where in the Bill would provision be made for the NHS to recognise explicitly the difficulties and differences in providing healthcare in isolated rural peripheral areas? It is fundamentally different from how it is provided in more urban areas.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I think that point will be explored in Committee. I cannot point him right now to the relevant clause, but it is a serious point. I would say that we will have a better chance of having such a managed and planned NHS, in which we can ensure that there are appropriate services in rural and urban areas, if we have a guiding mind back in charge of the NHS. That is exactly what was broken by the provider-purchaser split. The hon. Gentleman’s point is a good one, and I would love to see it debated further in Committee.

When it comes to the overall direction of travel and the duty to provide, it is shocking that the private hospital share of NHS-funded patients grew rapidly between 2006 and 2011. By 2010-11, private companies performed 17% of hip replacements and 17% of hernia repairs, and handled 8% of patients. First attendances for orthopaedics or trauma, such as broken limbs, also increased, yet it is the NHS that invests in training and picks up the pieces when things go wrong in the private sector, and it is the NHS that so often innovates.

Following the coalition’s Health and Social Care Act 2012, the NHS Support Federation has been charting the impact of Government policy on the use of outside providers to deliver and plan NHS care. Its report, which came out last month, charts the continuing steep escalation of creeping private sector involvement in the NHS. Its research shows that more than 400 NHS clinical contracts, worth £16 billion, have been awarded through the market since April 2013. Over that time the private sector has won nearly £5.5 billion of them, so let me give a few examples of the kind of corporate takeover that we are talking about.

In September 2015, Capita, despite its chequered record in the provision of public services, took control of a contract worth £1 billion to be the provider of primary care services in England. In October 2015, Virgin Care won a five-year, £64 million contract from Wiltshire clinical commissioning group, Wiltshire Council and NHS England to provide community child health services in Wiltshire. As of April 2016, services including children’s specialist community nursing, health visiting and speech and language therapy will all transfer to Virgin Care. In my constituency, the private company Optum, part of the giant American corporation UnitedHealth, last year won a £1.5 million contract from Brighton and Hove CCG for referral management services.

Such outsourcing goes on despite a trail of failed, terminated and collapsed contracts, such as the £235 million contract for provision of musculoskeletal services in West Sussex, which was awarded but never begun once it was determined just how much damage it would do to other NHS services in the region. Then there was the collapsed £800 million contract for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough older people’s services. There are estimates that the collapse of that contract has cost the local hospitals, GPs and community care providers about £20 million. There is a third example, of course—that of Circle, the private company running Hinchingbrooke hospital, which pulled out after just two years of a 10-year contract. That company’s announcement came just after the publication of a damning report on the hospital from the Care Quality Commission that raised serious concerns about care quality, management and the culture at the hospital.