National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and John Pugh

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), and I agree with most of what he said, but probably not the conclusion.

It gives me pleasure that we are having this debate. I think we all accept that the Bill will not go right the way through Parliament and end up on the statute book by 2015. We know what will happen: private Members’ Bills are lining up behind one another, and most of them will hit the buffers. However, the Bill moves the NHS debate up a notch.

It is fashionable at the moment to regard the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as a disastrous mistake. In fact, I believe that view is now shared in the Treasury. I did not support the Act, and not for the usual reasons—that it was not in the manifesto or the coalition agreement and was sprung upon Parliament. Those were good reasons, but they were not my main reason, nor was it because I am awkward or I thought it was a good career move. It was not because I did not see some of the upside, which I am sure the Minister will rehearse later—the emphasis on public health, clinical involvement, health inequality and mental health, and a smidgen of democratic accountability.

My main reason for opposing the Lansley Bill was that I saw it as the logical conclusion of a trend that began under Mrs Thatcher, was carried on by Blair and survives to this day. That trend, fundamentally, is an attempt to run the NHS as a market—not a real market, of course, but an internal market; a funny sort of Alice in Wonderland market with none of the advantages of a real market and most of the downside. It is one where everything is free, but prices, wages and policies are set by the Government; where NHS bodies compete not just against the private sector but against one another; where, as others have said, integration and real efficiency often go out of the window; where strategic leadership just does not seem to exist, as the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne said; where we struggle to deliver not products, as in ordinary markets, but entitlements; and where half the NHS, which we call commissioners, is billing the other half, which we call producers—that point has already been made—and bean-counters proliferate on either side and lock horns over bills.

In my view, the Health and Social Care Act was not so much about privatisation, or private industry helping to deliver NHS services—that was already happening under Labour—but primarily about marketisation. Some of course see that as a conspiracy—marketisation as the prelude to total privatisation—but I have to tell hon. Members that marketisation as a faith is still very much around, including on the Front Benches of most political parties, and is supported by practically every health think-tank we talk to.

The market, external or internal, tweak it as we may, simply cannot deliver entitlements and the moral objectives of the NHS in anything like an efficient manner. It cannot deliver to people the care that they need regardless of their means. Worse still, it solves none of the current problems of the NHS, which were largely parked in 2010—the financial pressures on the acute sector, which have come back to haunt us recently; the poor integration of services, which we have still not got right; and the separation of health and social care, which is unfinished business.

If I have a proposal to put to the House, it is that I would like to see the commissioner-provider split ended. That has been mentioned already. We moved an amendment at the Liberal Democrat conference to try to see whether and how that could be permitted. I would like to see the creation of local health boards, charged with integrating services and running them efficiently.

[Dr Huppert]

The amendment my hon. Friend is talking about was proposed by Cambridge Liberal Democrats, and I pay particular tribute to Councillor Kilian Bourke, who chairs the health committee in Cambridgeshire. It suggested allowing NHS commissioners and providers in a local area to form an integrated health organisation if that was what they wanted to do. Does my hon. Friend agree that that would achieve the benefits that he and I seek without the need to force through a massive top-down reorganisation? Would he urge the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) to accept such an amendment if the Bill made progress?

[John Pugh]

If the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) wished to talk about that, we could happily move away from the internal market where local circumstances required and demanded it. That would be an entirely sensible policy. I see no reason, though, why health boards should not procure goods and services based on simple best-value principles without all the competition legislation that has been vilified in the debate. They should be funded—as most services are—by capitation and according to local need, and they should be in some way democratically accountable, and I think we can get a genuine public service element back into the NHS. However, not every political party is advocating that at the moment, and some are steering in quite the opposite direction.