Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between John Healey and Gordon Birtwistle

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

We operated an NHS with a set tariff, not a maximum tariff. In government, we operated an NHS in which price could not be the factor that drove decisions about what services patients received and by whom they were provided. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields is absolutely right to point out that the Bill will introduce price competition and the flexing of the price so that there is no longer a set tariff for treatments and patients but a maximum price that can be undercut by providers coming into the field. The Government will not talk about that.

The Prime Minister is not helping the Health Secretary, because the changes the Bill makes were not in his election manifesto, not on his election posters and not in his election speeches. I have the Conservative manifesto here. There is no mention of axing all limits on NHS hospitals treating private patients, so that NHS patients lose out; no talk or mention of undercutting on price, so that established NHS services are hit as new private companies cherry-pick easier patients and services; no mention of guaranteeing only selective hospital services, so that others can be closed and lost to local people without public consultation; and no mention of putting a new market regulator at the heart of the NHS with the principal job of promoting and enforcing competition. There is no mention in the Conservative manifesto of the biggest reorganisation of the NHS since it was set up more than 60 years ago. They did not tell people about their plans before the election and they promised not to introduce such measures in the coalition agreement after the election. There is no mandate from the election or the coalition agreement for this fundamental and far-reaching reorganisation. That is not a debating point, but a point of democratic principle.

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

I do not remember in the 2005 Labour party manifesto the “Meeting Patients’ Needs” programme that closed the A and E unit and the children’s ward in Burnley. Do not start getting on to us about what we are and are not closing. The right hon. Gentleman closed those things. Does he agree that what he did was a disgrace to the people of Burnley?

[John Healey]

May I urge the hon. Gentleman to look very closely at the Bill and beyond what he hears the Health Secretary say when he talks about it? I urge him instead to look at how local hospitals could be undercut by private health companies, and at how GPs could be forced to put out work to those companies. That will undermine local hospitals such as the one in Burnley and lead to hospital closures driven not by proper planning and the development of better services in the community, but by hospitals being driven to the point of bankruptcy and closure.