Hinchingbrooke Hospital

John Healey Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Burns]

Under the agreements that have been signed, the consultants are there to manage an NHS hospital treating NHS-only patients and to ensure the finest quality of care for the NHS. That is the safeguard.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

At a time when progressive reform of our NHS requires greater collaboration and integration of services, with more being done for patients beyond the hospital, cannot Ministers see that that will be much harder to achieve when Hinchingbrooke hospital and others have been handed over to a private company with a single commercial interest in maximising profits and getting more patients into the hospital? Cannot they accept that it is a privatisation and that it is wrong in principle and wrong in practice?

[Mr Burns]

If it is privatisation—I utterly reject the claim that it is—and if it is wrong, it was the right hon. Gentleman’s Government who gave the powers to do this in their legislation and it was his successor as shadow Health Secretary, when Secretary of State, who instigated the proceedings to bring this about. It is a little odd for the right hon. Gentleman for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), for narrow, grimy and party political reasons, to try to blame us for something that he and his party instigated.