National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between John Healey and Clive Efford

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

rose—

[John Healey]

rose—

Future of the NHS

Debate between John Healey and Clive Efford

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

The point about the Health Secretary’s legislation is that it allows consortia to outsource in whole the job of, not the responsibility for, commissioning. He made the point that the consortia are public bodies, but they meet none of the standards of public governance. They can meet in private. As the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell) has said, that serious job should be done by properly constituted and governed public authorities, but that is a loophole in the Bill.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Like my right hon. Friend, I heard the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister over the weekend say that there will be changes to the Bill. However, every Government Member who has intervened has defended the position in the Bill. Will we see changes as a result of pausing, listening and reflecting, or not? Will the Liberal Democrats have a spine tonight and vote with the Opposition to get changes to the Bill?

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend puts the position and the challenge, especially to the Lib Dems, very clearly. The challenge to Conservative Members is this: they must recognise that the Prime Minister made the NHS his most personal pledge before the election. People wanted to believe him, but in just one year the NHS has become his biggest broken promise. My hon. Friend mentions the pause. In our Opposition motion in March, we urged the Government to

“pause the progress of the legislation in order to re-think their plans”.—[Official Report, 16 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 374.]

The Health Secretary dismissed that, but he has now been told to do so by the Prime Minister.

However, many of the signs point to the Prime Minister’s “pause to listen” being a sham. Just one week after the announcement, and in fact on the day that the Health Secretary received that historic vote of no confidence at the Royal College of Nursing, the NHS chief executive wrote to NHS managers to tell them that

“we need to continue to take reasonable steps to prepare for implementation and maintain momentum on the ground”.

The House is used to pre-legislative scrutiny, but not pre-legislative implementation.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between John Healey and Clive Efford

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that in order to shoehorn private enterprise into the NHS, the regulations are being written to add a 14% premium into the tariff for private sector companies that will be tendering for work?

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend may be right. I have not seen the regulations, but that is certainly in the impact assessment, so he is on to an important point.

Government Members and the Health Secretary have spent a long time talking about Labour’s plans, policies and record, but the debate at the heart of this Bill is not about whether competition, choice or the private sector has a part to play in the NHS—they have and they do. The debate at the heart of this Bill is about whether full-blown competition, based on price and ruled by competition law, is the right basis for our NHS. That is why Labour Members oppose this Bill. We want the NHS run on the basis of what is best for patients, not what is best for the market. We want the NHS to be driven by the ethos of public service, not by the economics of forced competition. We will defend to the end a health service that is there for all, fair for all and free to all who need it when they need it.

If the stated aims for the reform were all the Government wanted—we have heard the Health Secretary say that he wants a greater role for doctors in commissioning, more involvement of patients, less bureaucracy and greater priority put on to improving health outcomes—he should do what the GPs say: turn the primary care trust boards over to doctors and patients, so that they can run this and do the job. But there is no correlation between the aims that the Health Secretary sets out and the actions he is taking. There is no connection between his aims and his actions. He is pursuing his actions because his aims are not sufficient. His actions would not achieve the full-scale switch to forced market competition, which is the true purpose of the changes.

Meanwhile, the biggest challenges and changes for the NHS will be made harder, not easier, by the reorganisation. Such challenges include making £20 billion of efficiency savings and improving patient services; ensuring better integration of social care and health care, of primary care and hospital care, and of public health and community health; and providing more services in closer reach of patients in the community rather than in hospital. But the Government will not listen to the warnings from the NHS experts, the NHS professional bodies, patient groups or even the Select Committee on Health.