Care Bill [Lords]

Joan Walley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2014 Commons Chamber

Of course, the law—the previous Government’s National Health Service Act 2006, as amended by this Government’s Health and Social Care Act 2012—may already provide flexibility, and my new clause may be unnecessary. While Mid Staffordshire was going through its administration, I was told that the Secretary of State had no flexibility under the law, but when he made his decision two weeks ago, he accepted Monitor’s recommendations with a welcome addition—an instruction to NHS England to review how consultant-led maternity services might still be provided at Stafford. I and my constituents have been arguing that case throughout the administration, and I sincerely hope that NHS England will see how vital it is for consultant-led services to continue in a networked form within the University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust, of which Stafford hospital will now be an important part.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making well-informed comments about the whole issue we face. He says that the arrangements need to be looked at on another day, but surely our experience in Staffordshire and the complete confusion over a set of recommendations that have been accepted but cannot be implemented means that we ought to find some way to resolve the whole issue in this evening’s debate, not give the Secretary of State powers to close down general hospitals at random all over the country.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Ms Walley, in fairness, interventions must be very short.

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[Paul Burstow]

The hon. Gentleman anticipates my next point. It is far from clear how the judgment should be made that a trust is failing. In my view, the gateway to the process should be a narrow one, and it should be jealously guarded. My concern is that so many trusts are sitting on top of private finance initiative debt, and that hospitals could be at risk as a consequence. That debt amounts, over time, to about £70 billion; a significant burden has been hung around the neck of the NHS. I want to ensure that we have processes that can recognise and manage that without tipping organisations into crisis unnecessarily.

[Joan Walley]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that trust special administrators coming in and making recommendations, as they have done in the case of Staffordshire, can completely undermine the hospitals that are being asked to take over the failing hospitals? Such a process brings about no resolution to the problem at all.

[Paul Burstow]

I think the hon. Lady will find some sympathy for that view.

Local commissioners and trusts should be responsible for sorting out difficulties that could lead to a failure. Again, it needs to be clearer what happens at the pre-failure stage, and Ministers need to work with NHS England and Monitor to set out the pre-failure regime so that it is crystal clear what needs to happen to avoid triggering the TSA process. It might be argued, as Labour did in 2009, that when an NHS trust fails, there needs to be a fast way of making decisions about its future. Those decisions might have knock-on effects, but that should not mean that one trust’s failure triggers a wholesale re-engineering of local health services without proper checks and balances and accountability. Decisions about local health services should be taken by clinical commissioning groups.

I have tabled new clause 16 because I believe that two principles established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 deserve to be protected. The first principle is—