Health and Social Care Bill

Jonathan Reynolds Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will speak in favour of the Government dropping this truly awful piece of legislation.

Before I do so, I will say a few words about my constituent, Dr Kailash Chand, who began the e-petition against the Bill, which has reached 174,000 signatures. Kailash has been a GP in my area for 27 years. He has been awarded an OBE for his work and in 2009 he was named north-west GP of the year. He has dedicated his life to public health. At times he has spoken out against Government policy, whoever has been in charge. His motivation in creating the e-petition was solely his love for and belief in the NHS. We should be grateful for such public servants. I am delighted that he is here to listen to this debate.

[Mr Simon Burns]

So that everyone fully understands the background, will the hon. Gentleman confirm that this same doctor wants to be a Labour MP, has been appointed by the leader of the Labour party to review Labour party policy on older people, and has worked for the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) in a research capacity?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

The Government are just not willing to listen to the people who will be affected by the Bill. Kailash is not alone in opposing it. If I read out the name of every organisation that opposes the Bill, I would run out of time.

[Mr Burns]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

No, sit down and listen for once.

It is clear that the majority of non-biased, objective opinion is against the Bill proceeding. Never in the field of public policy have so many opposed so much and been listened to so little.

Should the Government not be asking themselves this: if the Health Secretary cannot convince the people who he wants to devolve power to, and if the Deputy Prime Minister cannot convince his own party members to support the Bill, maybe—just maybe—there is not that much going for it? The Health Secretary cannot even visit an NHS hospital, so low has his reputation sunk.

As has been said, the people who oppose the Bill, whether the royal colleges or Opposition Members, do not oppose all reform. Of course, NHS services will have to change over time, particularly in the provision of specialist services. The Labour Government introduced reforms, which used the private sector to the advantage of the NHS. The Bill does the opposite and uses the NHS for the benefit of the private sector. The problem is not reform, but these reforms. To say that anyone who opposes the Bill is against all reform is crass and simplistic.

Let us please put an end to the nonsense that the reforms are just an evolutionary approach following what has happened in the past. If that were the case, would there be an unprecedented groundswell of opinion against them? Once the Bill is passed, the primary care trusts and the strategic health authorities will be gone, and clinical commissioning consortia will be responsible for the whole NHS budget. Local authorities will take public health, and Monitor and the NHS Commissioning Board, not the Department of Health, will be responsible for the health system. That is a fundamental, top-down restructuring of the NHS, and no one wants it.

To justify that revolution, the Government started by rubbishing the success of the NHS. It began with the cancer survival rates and carried on from there, and every time the Government’s case has been knocked down. The King’s Fund, the respected health think-tank, in its review of NHS performance since 1997, clearly showed dramatic falls in waiting times; lower infant mortality; increased life expectancy across every social group; cancer deaths steadily declining; infection rates down, and in mental health services, access to specialist help, which is considered among the best in Europe. Again, I put it to the Government that they have no justification for the revolution that the Bill brings about.

The Government’s other justification has been that the NHS has too many managers, yet their reforms create a structure so confusing that, when an organogram of the new structure was published, it became a viral hit on the internet because it looked so ludicrous. What do the experts in the King’s Fund say about this? The myths section about the Bill on its website says:

“If anything, our analysis seems to suggest that the NHS, particularly given the complexity of health care, is under-rather than over-managed”.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

During the Bill’s passage, it has struck me just how vulnerable my constituents will be to doctors who are not as good as many of those who currently serve them well. One of our opportunities in Newham with a decent PCT was to deal with doctors who did not provide the right care. Is my hon. Friend , like me, concerned about the vulnerability of many of our constituents if the Bill is passed?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I agree with my hon. Friend. If the Bill is passed, perhaps one of the biggest changes will be to the relationship between doctor and patient. Every time a patient is not referred for some sort of specialist treatment, they will wonder whether that is on clinical grounds or because their GP has one eye on the budget. Whatever the basis for those fears, GPs will be in a difficult position, and because NICE guidance will no longer be compulsory, the problem will be compounded when people compare their experience with that of others, using the internet or other means.

However, the most worrying aspect derives from the stories that we hear from parts of the country where individual GPs might have a financial interest in the services that they now commission. Such a relationship would not only destroy the trust at the heart of the system, but provide perverse incentives for how it might develop in future.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Government Members have said that the Government will spend an extra £12.5 billion on the NHS. Yet University hospital in Coventry must make further cuts of £28 million this year. The Government boast about the increase in the number of doctors, but it takes seven years to train a doctor. Who, therefore, was responsible for training those doctors? The Labour Government.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

My hon. Friend is, as ever, correct. He knows that the problem that all parts of the health service face is that they have been given money to justify claims from Ministers to Parliament, but they must ring-fence some of it to pay for the reorganisation—£16 million in the case of my PCT.

The story of the Bill is the story of British politics at its absolute worst. We have a weak and unpopular measure, opposed by nearly everyone, pushed through by two out-of-touch party leaders because they are worried that they will look weak if they perform a U-turn. Even worse, whatever Government Members might say, we all know that, had the Downing street operation been up to speed from the beginning of this Government—if, for instance, they had had a policy team in the centre of Government—the Bill would never have got through. After all, why, after spending so much time and so much money convincing the public that they could trust the Tories on the NHS, and after making a commitment that there would not be a further top-down reorganisation of the NHS, have the Government embarked on a deeply unpopular and unwanted top-down reorganisation of the NHS? The Bill has confirmed every swing voter’s nagging fear—you simply cannot trust the Tories on the NHS.

We have the Bill for two reasons: the vanity of the Secretary of State for Health and the naivety of the Prime Minister. Neither is a good enough reason for proceeding. It is time to drop the Bill.