Health and Social Care Bill

John Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of whether the House should defer consideration of Lords Amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill until after disclosure of the NHS transitional risk register.

My right hon. Friends and I are grateful for your agreement to give the House this opportunity, Mr Speaker. On this of all days we should be celebrating what a much-valued social institution has done to bind our nation together throughout the 60 years of Her Majesty’s reign. Instead, we gather to dismantle it. A health service that is judged by international experts to be one of, if not the, best health service in the world is about to be inexplicably and unjustifiably broken apart by an ideological Bill ending 63 years of NHS history.

This is a difficult day, but what makes it all the harder to stomach for people watching is the manner in which things are happening. People outside will struggle to understand how Members of this House could make such momentous decisions without having carefully considered all the facts and all the evidence. The truth is that Members will go through the Lobby tonight without knowing the full implications of what it means for the NHS in their constituencies. How do they begin to justify that to their constituents, to patients who depend on the NHS and to staff who devote their lives to it? We have argued from the beginning that the Government’s decision to combine an unprecedented financial challenge in the NHS with the biggest ever top-down reorganisation has exposed the NHS to greater risk, and the truth is that we are beginning to see the effects of that. In our constituencies, they have already dismantled the existing structures of the NHS before the new ones are in place, leading to a loss of grip just when it was most needed. So we are seeing A and E waits getting longer, staff shortages leading towards A and E closures, and patients in our surgeries beginning to complain of treatments being restricted or of longer waits.

We have also heard from the health professions—from GPs, nurses, midwives and physios—who one by one have made clear their considered professional judgment that, on the balance of risks, it would be safer to abandon the Bill than to proceed with the upheaval of reorganisation. Ministers by their actions are putting the NHS at greater risk, but even today this House does not know the assessment that was given to Ministers or the precise nature and scale of those risks.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Burnham]

I do not plan to give way because I want other Members to have the chance to contribute to the debate.

Ministers want the House to back the gamble they are taking with the NHS without having the courtesy to tell it the odds. The Information Commissioner thinks we should see the risk register and so does the Information Rights Tribunal, which brought forward its ruling so that it could influence our proceedings. If the NHS starts to struggle because of all the change being thrown at it and if services in some parts of the country start to fail, how will Members of the House respond when people come to our surgeries and ask whether we did everything we could to anticipate the dangers? We will remind them of the truth—that Government Members put politics before the national health service and signed up to a reckless reorganisation without knowing all the facts.

[Mr Redwood]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I will give way once to the right hon. Gentleman and then I will finish my remarks.

[Mr Redwood]

I am very grateful. When Labour introduced private contractors to carry out NHS treatments, did that undermine the NHS?

[Andy Burnham]

No, because we brought down NHS waiting lists to their lowest ever levels and we left patient satisfaction at its highest ever level. Those same waiting lists are going up under the right hon. Gentleman’s Government and he should be ashamed of that. He will not publish the information about the risk to waiting times because he is frightened of putting it before the House and the public, but we will remind them of the truth.

The Government proclaimed that they were going to be the most open and transparent Government in history. Today, it still says on the Treasury website in a statement of the Government’s principles for risk management:

“Government will make available its assessments of risks that affect the public, how it has reached its decisions, and how it will handle the risk. It will also do so where the development of new policies poses a potential risk to the public.”

May I suggest that the Government take down that misleading statement of policy? Their actions have left it in tatters, together with the grand claims of openness and transparency. The tribunal, they will say today, has not given us its reasons. Ministers will try to argue that the public and Parliament’s right to know about the impact of their policy decisions is outweighed by the public interest in the preservation of a safe space for policy advice.

Those arguments were considered, first, by the Information Commissioner, and subsequently by the Information Rights Tribunal. They found the opposite to be the case: that the public interest lay in full disclosure. But it does not matter; Ministers are simply re-running the arguments of a case that they have lost. They have no leave to reopen the substance of that argument, but they are not the only arguments that they have lost.

In an attempt to rescue the Bill last year, the Prime Minister made a number of claims for it. They cover issues that we know are in the local and regional risk registers which have been published. First, he said the Bill was needed as the NHS does not

“deliver the patient-centred, responsive care we all want to see”.

He cited heart services and claimed that someone in this country is twice as likely to die from a heart attack as someone in France. That was before new research in January reported a 50% fall in heart attack deaths in the past decade.

Then the Prime Minister said that cancer services were failing people, compared with other countries. That was before new research in November 2011 which showed that the NHS in the past decade achieved the biggest drop in cancer deaths of any comparable health system in the world. Thirdly, the Prime Minister and all the Ministers on the Government Front Bench have routinely trotted out the same script for years—that NHS productivity has declined in the past decade. That was before new research on NHS productivity from Professor Nick Black published in February in The Lancet showed that, far from falling, NHS productivity increased in the past decade at the same time as the NHS achieved patient satisfaction.

One by one the Government’s arguments for the Bill have fallen apart. They have comprehensively lost the argument. They have convinced nobody and now they are running scared, resorting to the only remaining option of ramming the Bill through Parliament before they are required in law to publish the real assessment of their policies.