NHS (Private Sector)

John Redwood Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes there is an important role for the private sector in supporting the delivery of NHS care; welcomes the contribution made by private providers to the delivery of the historic 18-week maximum wait for NHS patients; recognises a need, however, for agreed limits on private sector involvement in the NHS; notes with concern the Government’s plans to open up the NHS as a regulated market, increasing private sector involvement in both commissioning and provision of NHS services; urges the Government to revisit its plans, learning from the recent problems with PIP implants and the private cosmetic surgery industry; believes its plan for a 49 per cent. private income cap for Foundation Trusts, in the context of the hospitals as autonomous business units and a ‘no bail-outs’ culture, signals a fundamental departure from established practice in NHS hospitals; fears that the Government’s plans will lead to longer waiting times, will increase health inequalities and risk putting profits before patients; is concerned that this House has not been given an opportunity to consider such a significant policy change; and calls on the Government to revise significantly downwards its proposed cap on the level of private income that can be generated by NHS hospitals.

It is a year this week since the Health and Social Care Bill was introduced in this House. Unlike the Government, we wanted to mark the anniversary, and having this Opposition debate seemed the right way to do it. It is being held because the Government have effectively sidelined this elected House from the debate about the future of the national health service. No single issue matters more to the people who put us all here, but what the future holds for the hospitals in our constituencies is no longer up to us. Instead, it is the unelected House that is right now carving up England’s NHS through back-room coalition deals. Ministers are making a series of desperate concessions in the other place to try to preserve the pitiful levels of support that remain for this unwanted and unnecessary Bill.

For the avoidance of doubt, let me summarise this scandalous situation. Here we have a Bill that nobody voted for. It was not in either the Tory or the Lib Dem manifestos, and it was ruled out specifically by the coalition agreement, yet it was rammed through this elected House so that the real decisions could be taken down the corridor in the unelected House. It is truly an affront to democracy that our nation’s most valued institution should be treated in this way. It thus falls to the Opposition to let this House take a view this evening on the far-reaching amendments to the Bill that are now being tabled, which Ministers were clearly too scared to table in this House.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

As we are debating the role of the private sector in health, does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the former Labour Health Secretary who said “PFI or bust”, and should he not have said “PFI and bust” given the way Labour ran PFI?

[Andy Burnham]

No, I would not agree. I shall explain the policy that our Government adopted on the private sector and how different it was from that of the Government whom the right hon. Gentleman supports. In making our argument we will expose the terrifying gap between the Prime Minister’s rhetoric on the NHS and what he is doing in reality. People will recall the efforts that went into rebranding the nasty party. The Conservatives were at great pains to tell us that they would be pro-environment, a bit less tough on crime and pro-NHS going forward. Many photo calls were arranged to send those messages to the public, but it was poor old NHS staff who featured far more than huskies or hoodies in being brought in to promote hastily made political promises. We were told there would be real-terms increases for the NHS, a moratorium on accident and emergency department closures, thousands more midwives and, famously, no top-down reorganisation—four promises made in opposition: four promises broken in government. I still have not worked out how a Prime Minister can go from agreeing there should be no top-down reorganisation with his coalition partners after the election to bringing forward just weeks later the biggest top-down reorganisation ever in the history of the NHS. How does that work? Perhaps Lib Dem Members will enlighten us this evening.

Our evasive Prime Minister is the master of making statements that sound good at the time only to turn out to be meaningless in practice. Tonight we will focus on his most outrageous yet. On Monday 16 May last year, under pressure to reassure people about the Health and Social Care Bill and in the middle of the enforced pause, the Prime Minister said, in a speech:

“That’s why, when I think about what our NHS will look like in five years time, I don’t picture some space-age institution, a million miles away from what we have now. Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation”.

Those were his words—“no privatisation”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Redwood]

On the point about implants, why did the NHS under Labour buy the same difficult implants that the private sector bought?

[Andy Burnham]

The point that I am making is about how to manage the system, how to ensure proper regulation and how to ensure that NHS providers and the system work in the interests of NHS patients. If the right hon. Gentleman is arguing that there would be the same control managing the system through a series of fragmented commercial contracts, I would be interested to have that debate with him. Frankly, I do not believe that he is being serious, if that is his point.