NHS Reorganisation Debate
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John Healey
Main Page: John Healey (Labour - Wentworth and Dearne)Department Debates - View all John Healey's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(13 years, 1 month ago)
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John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House supports the founding principles of the National Health Service (NHS); therefore welcomes the improvements patients have seen in the NHS and supports steps further to ensure the NHS is genuinely centred on patients and carers, achieves quality and outcomes that are among the best in the world, refuses to tolerate unsafe care, involves clinicians in decision-making and enables healthcare providers to innovate, improves transparency and accountability, is more efficient and gives citizens greater say; recognises however that all of those policies and aspirations can be achieved without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based reorganisation that is proposed, and already being implemented, by the Government; notes the strength of concerns being raised by independent experts, patient groups and professional bodies about the Government’s NHS reorganisation; further notes the similar concerns expressed by the Liberal Democrat Party spring conference; and therefore urges the Government to halt the implementation of the reorganisation and pause the progress of the legislation in order to re-think their plans and honour the Prime Minister’s promise to protect the NHS.
We have called this debate because of the growing crisis of confidence in the Government’s handling of the health service and the Conservatives’ NHS reorganisation, and a growing lack of confidence among independent experts, professional bodies and patients groups. Only one in four of the public back giving profit-making companies free access to the NHS, two thirds of doctors think the reorganisation will lead to worse, not better, patient services, and nearly nine in 10 believe it will lead to the fragmentation of services. When the Prime Minister misquotes me at Prime Minister’s Question Time in support of his plans, we know he is desperate and increasingly isolated.
John Healey
I will give way shortly.
Yesterday the British Medical Association delivered a comprehensive vote of no confidence in the Government’s plans. Dr Hamish Meldrum, the BMA chair, said they were
“driven by ideology rather than evidence, enshrined in ill-thought-through legislation and implemented in a rush during a major economic downturn.”
On Saturday the Lib Dems did the same. Baroness Williams called the plans “lousy” and a “stealth privatisation”. I heard that very good speech for myself at the conference in Sheffield, and I hope that today the House will hear speeches by the hon. Members for Southport (John Pugh) and for St Ives (Andrew George) similar to those that they made to their party conference on Saturday. I must also say to the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), that I hope that when he winds up this debate we do not hear the same flat and feeble apology that he gave for the Government’s plans when he opened the conference debate. He was totally rejected by his party, which told him and his parliamentary colleagues that the Health and Social Care Bill must be amended.
John Healey
I will give way in a moment.
The test for the Prime Minister is whether the Government’s proposals are always under review, as the Health Secretary said on Sunday, or whether this is not about significant changes to the policy, but about reassuring people as the Bill goes through the House, as people in the Department said on behalf of the Health Secretary on Monday.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that with an annual budget of £100 billion and rising, there is room for efficiency savings and reform? Why has he set his face against fundamental reform, which even the public accept needs to take place?
John Healey
Nobody can doubt our commitment to the NHS, and to both investment and reform, during our 13 years in office—often in the face of opposition from trade unions. Of course there is room for efficiencies, and there are ways to get much better value for money out of the NHS but, as the Select Committee on Health has said, the reforms will make it harder, not easier, to meet that challenge.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
Has the shadow Health Secretary seen the consultation responses to the White Paper, which show widespread support for the reforms?
John Healey
The hon. Gentleman needs to read some of the material for himself, rather than just reading the briefings provided by his Whips and his Front-Bench team. Some of the 52 organisations that this Government and the Health Secretary claim supported the Bill have written to me saying that far from supporting the principles of the Bill, they have “grave concerns” about the White Paper; that was said by the Patients Association. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy has said:
“We have been very clear that we have grave concerns about the scope and speed of the structural changes proposed”.
Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and others do not take kindly to being misrepresented by Ministers as supporting this Bill when they have such grave concerns.
Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
I always thought that the right hon. Gentleman was a reformer at heart, but he obviously is not, given what he is saying today. Why did productivity in our hospitals decline by 15% during the 13 years of the Labour Government, while bureaucracy increased?
John Healey
One of the problems—we all know this, and the new Government will be faced with it in exactly the same way—is exactly how to measure productivity in the NHS. Given the complexity of what is provided for patients—and the requirement to put together packages of care to help people recover from serious illness and live independently is so complex—it is hard to do that. The NHS just is not like a commercial business, which is what this Government want to turn it into.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Let us consider something more quantifiable. Is the right hon. Gentleman in favour of more or less bureaucracy in the NHS?
John Healey
Let me send the hon. Gentleman a copy of the Labour manifesto, because we set out exactly how we could make significant savings from the bureaucracy.
John Healey
I am just responding to the hon. Gentleman’s colleague, so I ask him to be patient. We set out exactly how we could reduce the costs and some of the bureaucracy. Perhaps the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) could ask his Front-Bench colleagues how bureaucracy will be cut when the function currently carried out by 150 primary care trusts in England will be carried out instead by more than double that number of general practitioner consortia.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
Perhaps the Secretary of State, too, would share his thoughts about how money will be saved on bureaucracy when expenditure on Monitor, which will take on a new economic regulator role under clause 52 of the Health and Social Care Bill, will increase from £21 million a year under Labour to as much as £140 million a year—£500 million over the course of a Parliament. How is that saving money on bureaucracy?
John Healey
My hon. Friend does a great job in ensuring that this Government are held to account on the NHS through the Health Committee. He rightly says that Monitor’s budget is currently about £20 million and the impact assessment calculates that that could increase to as much as nearly £140 million—although Monitor’s core operating costs are not that entire total, the figure will be at least three times as high as it is now. That is not a decrease in bureaucracy and operating costs, it is an increase. Hon. Members would do well to read some of the documents, rather than the briefings they have been given by their Front Benchers.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) has told us that Monitor’s budget will increase by the amount that he said, but does my right hon. Friend agree that it will continue to increase exponentially, because the Government are opening up the NHS to European competition law, and that competition will grow exponentially year on year?
John Healey
This is such a big and fundamental change to the NHS that £140 million is the best guess. Clearly, as the competition role of Monitor increases and the competition legislation it has to deal with becomes stronger, those costs could increase. We simply do not know, because this is a leap in the dark for the NHS.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
Having listened to the debate at our party conference on Saturday, the right hon. Gentleman will know that there were strong views that the Bill needed to be further improved and strengthened, but he will also know that there was no call for it to be pulled or paused. He will also remember that when his party and my party joined together to form the NHS, the doctors were not always on the side of the enlightened.
John Healey
The Liberal Democrats are quick to try to claim credit for other people’s successes, and quick to try to duck responsibility for some of the difficult challenges they face. However, the right hon. Gentleman is right—it was the BMA that called yesterday for the Bill to be withdrawn. Our motion calls not for it to be withdrawn but for a pause in its passage through Parliament to give the Government a chance to rethink, exactly as was requested by speaker after speaker at his conference in Sheffield on Saturday, and all but a handful of the members who voted at it.
John Healey
I am going to make some progress. We are all conscious of your encouragement to do that, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Some say that the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary are failing to get the message across, but from the start they have told only half the story. The Tories did not tell people about their plans for reorganisation and market competition at the heart of the NHS before the election, and they did not tell the Lib Dems about them before they signed the coalition agreement pledging that there would be no NHS reorganisation. There is no mandate from the election or the coalition agreement for this fundamental reorganisation and far-reaching legislation. They will not be straight with people about their plans. This is not just about communication; it is about judgment. In the face of widespread warnings, they are forcing through at breakneck speed the biggest reorganisation in the NHS’s history.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman wisely started by saying that there is room for reform. The right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) had plans in his Budget for a 20% cut in the NHS. Will the shadow Secretary tell us which bit of the NHS he would cut to deliver that 20%?
John Healey
There is someone else who needs a copy of the Labour manifesto. He almost used his six minutes’ allocation to make that intervention.
John Healey
I am going to move on. If that is the best the Conservatives can do, I am going to move on.
The truth is that the more people see of the plans, the less they like them. The closer they look the more concerned they become, because they start to see far-reaching changes at the very heart of this reorganisation and legislation. These are the wrong reforms for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. As our motion says, and as the Lib Dem conference motion said, most people would agree on the declared and desirable objectives—indeed, that is the direction in which the Labour Government were heading—but those aims could be better achieved without this huge internal reorganisation and, as the Lib Dem conference motion stated,
“without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based approach that is proposed.”
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is room for reform, but not room to risk the GP-patient relationship? Dr Gerada and the Manchester business school have both highlighted that there is a risk that bonuses and profits could be put above diagnoses and treatment.
John Healey
My hon. Friend is right: this reorganisation and legislation leave no part of the NHS untouched. One big concern is that when GPs are making both rationing and referral decisions at the same time, patients will start to ask whether their GP is making a judgment about their treatment in their best interests or in the best interests of his or her budget and consortia business. That can hit at the trust at the heart of the patient-doctor relationship.
Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way so generously. He has mentioned the Labour manifesto twice, and I just happen to have a copy of it. It says that Labour will support a
“role for the independent sector”,
encourage any willing provider, make all hospitals foundation trusts and give them the
“freedom to…increase their private services”.
On that basis, will he explain why he and the leader of the Labour party, who I believe to have been the author of that manifesto, are reneging on that position?
John Healey
We were doing what the manifesto said before the election. [Interruption.] We were doing it where the private sector and competition could add capacity to clear waiting lists, or do something new that the NHS was not doing. We did it in circumstances that were carefully planned, properly managed and always publicly accountable. If the hon. Gentleman is going to swallow the guff from those on his Front Bench that this is somehow an evolution of Labour’s policy, he will have to ask the Health Secretary why he needs legislation that is more than three times longer than the Act that set up the NHS in the first place.
Why do we say what we do in the motion before the House? In truth, this is a Tory reorganisation, and the legislation has been mis-sold. It is not just about getting GPs to lead commissioning or looking to cut layers of management; it is setting up the NHS as a full-scale market driven by the power of the competition regulator and the force of competition law. The reorganisation and legislation is designed to break up the NHS, open up all areas of the NHS to private health companies, remove requirements for proper openness, scrutiny and accountability to the public and to Parliament, and make the NHS subject to both UK and European competition law. The Tories are driving the free market political ideology through the heart of the NHS.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
On precisely that point about scrutiny and accountability, we have been talking about independent sector providers. Under Labour, if scrutiny committees in local authorities wanted to investigate the activities of independent sector providers they could not do so. Under our legislation, they will be allowed to do so. Wherever NHS money—the public pound—goes, scrutiny will be able to follow. That is a change for the better.
John Healey
That is simply not true. The people who will make the big decisions about £80 billion of spending—the GP consortia—will not need to meet in public or to publish minutes of their meetings. They will not be subject to scrutiny by this House or proper public accountability.
Let me turn now to the question of subjecting the NHS to UK and European competition law. The Prime Minister clearly did not know about that at Prime Minister’s questions today—he clearly did not know that a third of his legislation sets up this new free market NHS. Perhaps the Health Secretary has only told him half the story about the legislation—
John Healey
Shall I finish what I have to say? Then I will give way. If the Health Secretary has not told the Prime Minister, he certainly has not told the public or this House, so let me spell it out—[Interruption.] The Health Secretary says that I have made it up, but why not wait for me to explain to the House, and then he can say whether what I am about to explain to the House is in my words or his?
Clause 52 of the Health and Social Care Bill, entitled “General duties”, sets up the new competition regulator, Monitor, and says:
“The main duty of Monitor in exercising its functions is to protect and promote the interests of people who use health care services—
(a) by promoting competition where appropriate, and
(b) through regulation where necessary.”
The new regulator is given legal competition powers, as well as functions under the Competition Act 1998 and the Enterprise Act 2002, and there are provisions on reviews by the Competition Commission and co-operation with the Office of Fair Trading.
John Healey
The Secretary of State can speak in a minute; I will finish this point. The regulator can investigate complaints about competition, force services to be put out to competitive tender, remove licences and fine the commissioner or provider up to 10% of their turnover. Helpfully, the Government’s new chair of Monitor confirms that. In The Times last month, he said:
“We did it in gas, we did it in power, we did it in telecoms, we’ve done it in rail, we’ve done it in water, so there’s actually 20 years of experience in taking monopolistic, monolithic markets and providers and exposing them to economic regulation”.
Mr Lansley
It is dead simple: the Health and Social Care Bill does not extend the application of EU competition law, or the application of domestic competition law. The powers given to Monitor as a sector regulator are the same as those now available to the Office of Fair Trading. The Bill does not change the scope of competition law at all.
John Healey
The right hon. Gentleman was involved, so he knows better than anyone else that the Tories are now setting out to do to the public services, including the NHS, what they did to the public utilities in the 1980s.
John Healey
Let me finish. The Government’s explanatory memorandum is helpful on the issue of EU law. It says, about chapters 1 and 2 of the Bill—the one third of the legislation that sets up the new competition system—that
“The Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 prohibitions are modelled on Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union which prohibit agreements that prevent, restrict or distort competition, and abuse of a dominant market position.
Monitor would have concurrent powers with the OFT to conduct investigations where it had reasonable grounds for suspecting that either of these two prohibitions—under either UK or EU law—had been infringed in the provision of health services in England.”
That means that a competition challenge in the NHS can be taken all the way to the European Court.
Helpfully, under pressure in Committee yesterday, the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), confirmed that
“As NHS providers develop and begin to compete actively with other NHS providers and with private and voluntary providers, UK and EU competition laws will increasingly become applicable.”––[Official Report, Health and Social Care Public Bill Committee, 15 March 2011; c. 718.]
As GP consortia will be corporate bodies, not public sector bodies, and as hospitals will be competing with each other, will have no limit on treating private patients, and will have no support from the wider NHS if they run into financial problems, they will be bodies to which the EU competition rules and legislation apply. That means that the NHS will be tied up in the red tape of market regulation and competition law, and we risk decisions about who provides our health care services being taken not in England by GPs or Ministers, but in Brussels by the European Commission, and in Luxembourg by the European Court.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman has already acknowledged that competition and markets were a hallmark of the Labour Government; they took them far further than the previous Conservative Government ever did. Of 475 acute care sites providing elective care, 175 are independent sector providers. The Bill proposes making the competition fair and putting it on a level playing field. No longer will we allow the private sector to be as favoured as it was under the Labour Government.
John Healey
This is a debate. People in the country and in the NHS are worried not about what we did in government—they saw the massive improvements under Labour—but about the application of competition law, domestic and European, in full force to the NHS for the first time. The hon. Lady is serving on the Public Bill Committee. She will have the chance to get her head around that, as she clearly has not done so yet.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend has anticipated the point that I was going to make. As we heard clearly in Committee yesterday—the Secretary of State ought to read the Official Report—his Minister, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), let the cat out of the bag. Hitherto the NHS has been insulated from European competition law. As there are more entrants to the market, competition law will have to apply—competition red in tooth and claw—followed by the break-up of the NHS.
John Healey
My hon. Friend is right. We have misinformation and confusion. If the Health Secretary disagrees with his Health Minister, I suggest that they have a word about it after the debate.
In the end, perhaps Nye Bevan was right. When Clement Attlee suggested that the NHS opening should be celebrated as a national institution supported by the whole nation, he said, “The Conservatives voted against the National Health Act, not only on second but the third reading. . . I don’t see why we should forget this.”
It is time for the Health Secretary to tell us why he is spending £2 billion on an NHS reorganisation when front-line staff and services are being cut. How many hospitals will be forced to close because of these reforms? Why is he handing such powers over our NHS to new national quangos, competition lawyers and the EU? Why is there no democratic voice in commissioning? Why is he allowing profit to be made in commissioning essential health services? Why is he removing any limit on private patients paying to jump the queue for treatment in NHS hospitals?
John Healey
It is time the Health Secretary told us who is fully in support of the NHS reorganisation and the legislation. NHS staff, dedicated to the part that they play in our NHS, will strive to keep things going whatever the pressures, but patients are starting to see operations cancelled, waiting times rise, hospital services at risk, front-line staff jobs cut and services cut. This is not what people expected when the Prime Minister said that he would “protect the NHS”. Instead, they are seeing the Prime Minister’s NHS promises to “protect front-line services”, to “give the NHS a real rise in funding”, and to “stop top-down reorganisations that get in the way of patient care” all broken. The NHS was the Prime Minister’s most personal pledge. It is now becoming his biggest broken promise.
Now is the time to listen to the chorus of criticism and concern, and to recognise the growing crisis of confidence in the Government’s handling of the health service. Now is the time to call a time out, pause the passage of the Bill in Parliament, and think again. I commend the motion to the House.
Mr Lansley
I want to make progress. I have given way several times.
The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) said that we planned to get rid of regional system management in the NHS, but that was Labour’s policy when it introduced NHS foundation trusts. Through introducing health and well-being boards in local authorities, we will have a genuine, system-wide view that looks at the NHS, public health and social care. He complains about the commercial insolvency regime, but Labour introduced that under the legislation that set up the foundation trusts eight years ago. He said that our plans introduce EU competition law. No. EU competition law already exists and the Bill does nothing to change that—it does not extend the application of competition law. [Interruption.] No, it does not. In Committee, the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), explained the current position, which the Bill does not change.
The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne and other Labour Members talk about price competition. We have clarified the Bill to ensure that the competition is on quality. What happened under Labour? The private sector was paid 11% more than the NHS. Under Labour, private sector providers were paid £250 million for operations that they did not perform. Under Labour, NHS hospitals were barred from tendering to provide the capacity that Labour offered to the independent sector. Labour Members favoured the private sector. A Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment stated that we would not in future allow the private sector to be given advantages and the NHS to be shut out. We will implement that.
I want to know a bit, because although the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne said that it was the Opposition’s job to ask questions today, I have done many Opposition day debates on health when I was asked many times what our policy was, and I answered those questions. Is it Labour’s policy to extend the use of voluntary sector providers in the NHS? That was in the Labour party’s manifesto. Indeed, Labour said that it wanted to use the independent private sector, too. Is it still the policy? No answer. We do not know. Is it Labour’s policy to make every trust an NHS foundation trust? Again, it was in the Labour party manifesto. Is it still the Labour party’s policy—yes or no? No answer. Again, we do not know. Is it Labour’s policy to promote competition in the NHS, as quoted from the Labour party manifesto in the debate? The right hon. Gentleman has just made a speech opposing that. Does he wish to intervene?
John Healey
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. We had the NHS as the preferred provider and were ready to use other providers when they could help, and we did so. The great improvements in the NHS happened because we were prepared to put in the investment and to make the reforms. The Secretary of State talks about policies. The problem with what he is doing to the NHS—the reorganisation, the legislation and the ideological change at the heart of it—is that he did not tell the people about it before the election and he did not tell the Lib Dems about it before they signed the coalition agreement. This top-down reorganisation is exactly what he promised not to do.
Mr Lansley
The right hon. Gentleman was not satisfied with his first speech, so he had to have a go at a second one. He did not answer any of my questions. The Labour party said in its manifesto that it would use the private and voluntary sectors alongside NHS providers. The reason for that was simple: having the NHS as the preferred provider meant that the patient could be let down time after time before another quality provider could be permitted. We are going to allow competition on quality, but the quality has to be there. Patients will get the best possible service from whoever is best placed to provide that care.
Our changes are being seen across the country already.