Oral Answers to Questions

John Healey Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I am glad to have the opportunity to welcome the hon. Lady to the Opposition Benches and wish her well in representing Oldham East and Saddleworth. I am sorry that she did not take the opportunity to welcome in particular the Government’s commitment to the new women and children’s unit at the Royal Oldham hospital.

For years, general practices have been remunerated partly through a quality and outcomes framework. The principle is that if they deliver better outcomes for patients, they should have a corresponding benefit from doing so. In the same way, if the commissioning consortia deliver improving outcomes for patients, that should be recognised in their overall reward.

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

The Secretary of State talks a lot about GPs using £80 billion of public money to commission services, but if they are to carry on being family doctors, the planning, negotiating, managing and monitoring of hundreds of commissioning contracts will be done not by GPs but in their name, either by the people who do it now in primary care trusts or by the big health companies that are already hard-selling the service to new GP consortia. Is he not deliberately disguising the true purpose of his changes, which is to open up all parts of the NHS to big private health care companies?

[Mr Lansley]

On the contrary, the purposes of the Bill are very clear to see—for example, the duty to improve quality and raise standards throughout the health service. I hope that the shadow Secretary of State will acknowledge that putting clinical leadership at the heart of the system is essential. I entirely understand that leadership is not the same thing as management, as do general practitioners. The Prime Minister and I will meet the first wave of pathfinder consortia tomorrow, and we will support them in taking clinical leadership in designing services for patients and bringing to bear the best management support in doing so.

[John Healey]

Why will the right hon. Gentleman not be straight with the public? I have with me the White Paper—57 pages and only three references to the market, all of them to the social market. He talks about GP commissioning, but not about the hard-line political ideology that underlines these changes. The Bill puts no limit on the use of NHS beds and staff to treat private patients, it puts no limits on big private health care companies undercutting and undermining local hospitals, and it puts at the heart of the new system an economic regulator charged not with improving services but with guaranteeing and enforcing competition. Is this NHS reorganisation not like an iceberg, with the substantial ideological bulk being kept out of the public’s sight?

[Mr Lansley]

The shadow Secretary of State cannot actually criticise what we put forward in the White Paper or the Bill and is resorting to inventing something else and attacking that. Let me tell him that the one thing we will not do with the private sector is rig the market so that private companies get contracts and guaranteed money whether or not they treat patients. We are not going to give them 11% more money than the NHS would get for doing the same work. We will give NHS organisations a proper chance to deliver services for patients.