National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between John Healey and John Pugh

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman is not altogether wrong, but if we are to continue to deliver, in stressed circumstances, a service that is free at the point of need, we cannot run the NHS as an internal market for ever. In fact, the NHS is already trying to morph into something different. We now have health and wellbeing boards, which mean that commissioners and providers get together to try to agree a local plan. They are struggling in every way to behave like a health board, but they do not have the executive powers to do so. There has been the move away from tariffs, which have been used to try to adjust the market, and we are now talking about whole-treatment costs. There is also talk about integration.

What is clearly entirely disruptive, though, is the intrusion of competition where it is not needed—where it is simply dogma; where it is seen as a panacea for producing good results, whether or not there is a good case for saying that; where it derails sustainable services; or where it becomes a central operating principle of the NHS. None of those things is particularly helpful.

I do not want to comment on TTIP, because I do not think it is well understood at the moment, but we will certainly need to look at how it plays into the competition agenda.

[John Healey]

If the hon. Gentleman or any other Members want to know a little bit more about TTIP, particularly the potential impact on the NHS and public services, we have a meeting of the all-party group on European Union-United States trade and investment at 2 o’clock on Monday, at which the EU chief negotiator will be on the panel alongside Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison. The hon. Gentleman might like to come along.

[John Pugh]

If the right hon. Gentleman reminds me, I will endeavour to do so. What I am really hoping for, though, is a change in the conversation about the NHS so that we stop talking about the internal market—Labour Front Benchers have in a sense reneged on their involvement in that—and instead talk about how we should organise NHS services that will efficiently deliver the moral entitlements that people expect.

Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

Debate between John Healey and John Pugh

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

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

Last week, we had a political fix on the Government’s health Bill. This week, we have a procedural fix. The way the Government are dealing with the national health service and with the House of Commons is a disgrace. Last week, the Prime Minister was forced to backtrack in some areas to buy off the many critics of his health plans. This week, to head off proper parliamentary scrutiny of his plans, he refuses to put the whole Bill back into Committee.

The changes announced last week to the Prime Minister’s NHS changes are not a proper plan for improving patient care, or for a better or more efficient NHS. Those aims could largely be met without legislation, and certainly without the huge risk and cost of the biggest reorganisation in NHS history. The big quality and efficiency challenges the NHS must meet for the future will be made harder, not easier, by the reorganisation and the announcements last week.

The NHS has seen a wasted year of chaos, confusion and incompetence from the Government. Today, it is clear from the motion that that will continue. The motion signals the onset of sclerosis in the health service. The Bill will mean that the NHS is deeply mired in more centralisation, more complex bureaucracy and more wasted cost in the years to come. There will be five new national quangos and five new local bodies doing the job that one—the primary care trust—does at present.

Today, the motion signals that the essential elements of the Tories’ long-term plan to see the NHS broken up as a national service and set up as a full-scale market are still intact.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

Regardless of the merits of the Bill, does the right hon. Gentleman accept that what the NHS and the public want is to find out whether the House supports it? They do not want to prolong the agony.

[John Healey]

What the public and patients want is to get to the bottom of the changes the Government said they were bringing in. They want us to do our proper job of scrutinising the detail, and for that we need the time to do so, with the full Bill recommitted to the Public Bill Committee. Even some of the hon. Gentleman’s Lib Dem colleagues are beginning to see through this. Yesterday, the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) wrote that the Government

“leaves many of the previous concerns—about the risk of a marketised NHS, a missed opportunity to better streamline health and social care and a lack of accountability—still unresolved.”

[John Pugh]

But does the right hon. Gentleman accept that those concerns will all be covered in the areas of the Bill to be discussed? Nothing will be left out.

[John Healey]

I do not normally quote the hon. Gentleman’s party leader, but a few weeks ago, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

“It is very important that MPs, who represent millions of patients up and down the country, have the opportunity to really look at the details that we are proposing…I have always said that it is best to take our time to get it right rather than move too fast and risk getting the details wrong.”

The Prime Minister has stopped listening to the Deputy Prime Minister, and that is exactly the mistake the Government are making with the motion.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between John Healey and John Pugh

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

Well, my hon. Friend is right in this respect: people will come to see clearly that they cannot trust the Tories with the NHS; they will come to see clearly what these changes really mean for their services; and they will come to see clearly what the future of the NHS holds.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I cannot follow the previous contribution, but the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned democratic accountability, so will he accept that in 10 years of Labour government, nothing was done about democratic accountability in the NHS? We simply had rule by quangos.

[John Healey]

No, I do not accept that, but I will tell the hon. Gentleman that the measures in this Bill will undermine many of his principal concerns and policy priorities about opening up the NHS to the public and to Parliament. I hope that he will take a close look at what the Health Secretary really plans.

NHS Reorganisation

Debate between John Healey and John Pugh

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

I thought the hon. Gentleman was in his place at the start of the debate. In that case, he will have heard me say that one reason for having an Opposition day debate on both health and education is that we see many of the same ideological fingerprints over the plans for education and for health. These are Tory ideological fingerprints, and I hope that this will become clearer as the debate progresses.

Let us make no mistake: if these changes go ahead, patients will rightly question whether GPs’ decisions are about the best treatment for them or about the best interest of the GP budget and consortium business. The public will find “commercial in confidence” stamped over many of the most important decisions taken about our NHS services. Members of Parliament wanting to hold Ministers to account in future when hospitals go bust, there are no contracted services for constituents or there is a serious failure in the system will be told, “It’s nothing to do with me”.

[Dr John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

Was the right hon. Gentleman perfectly happy about the situation under the last Government? When anyone complained in this Chamber about anything happening in their local health economy, they were told rather piously by a Minister that it was a matter for local decision making by a quango that was completely unelected and beyond their control. In what sense were the PCTs in any sense accountable?