NHS Dentistry: Bristol and the South-west

Debate between Karin Smyth and Darren Jones

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I am grateful to have secured this evening’s Adjournment debate on access to NHS dentistry in Bristol and the south-west. Over the past few months, many of my constituents have told me how difficult it has become to find and access an NHS dentist in and around my constituency of Bristol North West. Their accounts have been wide-ranging, from having their NHS treatment left in limbo following the closure of a local practice to having to look as far as Gloucester to try and register as a new patient with an NHS provider.

In particular, last year an NHS dental surgery in Southmead in my constituency unexpectedly closed to patients. Many of my constituents were left without an NHS dentist, often mid-treatment. One constituent explained that they had paid for NHS treatment prior to the closure of the dental surgery but had been unable to secure another appointment with a local dentist. Their dental work remains incomplete. Another constituent described contacting nine dental practices across Bristol to try and resume their treatment as soon as possible, only to be told that none was accepting NHS patients.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this important debate; I have similar stories from my constituents. Does he agree that we also need to think about pregnant women, for example, who have free access to care but are also being denied access to dentistry at a really important point of their life?

[Darren Jones]

I absolutely agree, and I thank my hon. Friend for her contributions, not least as a leading voice on healthcare policy, knowing that prevention is more important than cure.

A third constituent of mine rang over 25 practices across the south-west, but was unable to secure an appointment as an NHS patient—something that has affected patients who were pregnant as well as everyone else. Southmead in particular is now left without any NHS dentists at all.

Adult Community Services

Debate between Karin Smyth and Darren Jones

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered re-procurement of adult community services by Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I am pleased that this important subject has been selected for debate. Although they cannot be present, my hon. Friends the Members for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) fully support my comments. This is an important issue for the people of Bristol South, and it is a local example of the debate on the legacy of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and of the invidious position that local managers are being put in to understand the procurement rules.

Hon. Members know that I speak frequently about accountability and the opaque way in which many parts of the NHS operate. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that, however individual bodies are constituted, our health services are public services that are paid for by taxpayers—our constituents. I have also repeatedly said that if we keep asking people to pay more for our health services, they must have a greater say in the way that those services are run, particularly when they are being changed.

I have spoken before of my concern about the attitude of my local clinical commissioning group in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire to the openness and transparency of its work, especially on the reprocurement of adult community services. The lengths to which the CCG, supported by NHS Improvement, has gone to hide, cover up and obfuscate are nothing short of a scandal. Most infuriatingly, the whole protracted cloak-and-dagger exercise has been entirely unnecessary, because a far less onerous and costly approach could have been used instead. The reprocurement is the wrong approach at the wrong time to developing community services, and runs counter to the direction of travel being set, in theory, by the new NHS 10-year plan.

Before I review the shortcomings of the reprocurement in greater detail, I will remind hon. Members why it matters. Away from the jargon, acronyms, terse letters and confidentiality agreements, thousands of people across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire simply want to know what is happening to their local health services.

My constituent Clive got in touch just over a year ago to tell me about the great work being done at the Healthy Together leg clinic at the Withywood Centre, which provides intervention and treatment for the leg ulcers of patients in south Bristol. It is exactly the sort of joined-up, innovative and integrated community provision that Ministers tell us they want to see—a true partnership between Bristol Community Health, local GP practices and Age UK in Bristol, which come together across different sites to deliver gold-standard patient care that promotes faster and longer-lasting wound healing. The clinic also provides a social setting where patients feel more supported and are encouraged to feel more in control of their condition. There is time for people to care.

The service has transformed countless lives in my constituency and has been nominated for a national award. As I saw first hand when I visited the clinic earlier this month, it is an exemplar of the sort of collaborative provision that the new adult community services contract could and should expand on. Such collaboration takes years to yield results and very much responds to the local needs of the particular community.

The people who are providing the service, however, do not know for how long they will be able to continue, because the CCG will not tell them. The patients do not know for how long they will be able to access that life-changing service, because the CCG will not tell them. As the local MP, I cannot lobby, engage or reassure people, despite asking repeatedly for a peek behind the self-imposed reprocurement iron curtain, because—hon. Members will have guessed it—the CCG will not tell me.

Interestingly, another consequence of the process, which I do not have time to really go into, is the destabilising impact on the voluntary sector. Age UK will have to wait, cap in hand, to see which successful bidder secures the primary contract and how it then decides to sub-contract the provision. The same goes for all voluntary organisations involved in this sort of service provision. It would be bad enough if the Healthy Together clinic were a one-off —the only service caught up in a closed-shop procurement mess—but it is not. In truth, every adult community service is in the same position, which is simply not good enough.

Despite a year of making speeches in this place, asking questions of Ministers, doing time-consuming research and making countless phone calls to offices, neither the CCG locally nor NHS Improvement nationally will engage with me beyond continually asserting that they had no choice but to go down this route. That is a prime example of what the Health and Social Care Committee referred to in its recent report, which said that the

“problems stem not only from the procurement rules themselves, but also from people’s interpretation of these rules and their difficulty in understanding what is permissible within the rules.”

In place of answers, I am forced to restate the litany of my constituents’ questions and concerns that have essentially gone unanswered. First, there is a fundamental lack of clarity surrounding the reprocurement and an abject failure to link it to any broader NHS strategies. I am not the only one who is concerned about the process. I have been spoken to privately by many consultants, nurses, and other staff throughout the healthcare system; I am grateful to them for contacting me.

At no point has the CCG properly defined a needs assessment in the request for proposals. Moreover, at no point has it made the business case for change—the most basic starting point for any such process. Staggeringly, there is no service baseline, so we do not know what services exist. By extension, there are no defined outcomes, so bidders are being asked to make proposals. That is not what commissioning is meant to be about.

Although Ministers continue to trumpet the importance of the sustainability and transformation plans, there is no sense of alignment with those plans, the NHS long-term plan or the emerging integrated care systems. Similarly absent is any indication of integration with local councils on social care or public health, which we all acknowledge are the key issues facing our constituents.

Secondly, there are concerns about the chosen procurement process, because any number of much less onerous and costly approaches were possible. As ever, however, accurately assessing the process is near impossible because of the vice-like secrecy that the CCG has used throughout. What is certain is that we do not know how much it is costing the CCG or the bidders, which include the current not-for-profit community service providers. That means that we do not know how much it is costing us, the taxpayers.

I worked in the national health service for many years, and I have some experience of procurement in the organisation, but I have struggled to understand properly the process through which the procurement has been undertaken. To illustrate, the CCG’s description of the chosen process, in its own words from its own document—bear with me, Mr Gapes, because I did not write it—says:

“The procurement is being undertaken using a process developed by the CCG which has similarities to a competitive process with negotiation. For the avoidance of doubt, the CCG is not running the process strictly in accordance with any specific procedure set out in the Regulations so reserves the right to depart from that form of procedure at any point. This Request for Proposals sets out the procurement process the CCG plans to use for this particular Contract. The inclusion of particular stages, the use of terminology and any other indication shall not be taken to mean that the CCG intends to hold itself bound by the full scope of the Regulations.”

What does that mean? I think it means that the process is as clear as mud, carried out behind a wall of secrecy, but with a disclaimer that enables the CCG to do what it wants without our knowledge. Although we cannot access the process details, what we know does not bode well.

There are myriad loose ends and errors throughout the process. Taken together, they form a significant body of concerning issues. Of course, I would never have known about them—most people do not—if I had not scoured 300 pages of detail and 100 clarification questions asked by bidders. In fairness, I doubt the CCG was expecting anybody outside the process, including the local MP, to do so, but I read them all because I like detail and I think it is important to know what is going on. A lot of the gaps and oversights concerned me.

There seem to have been incorrect working assessments about bed numbers at South Bristol Community Hospital; gaps relating to workforce numbers and staff who have been TUPE-ed; and a number of misunderstandings and examples of where the CCG lacked knowledge about current contracts, rental payments and void space. There is also missing information about assets, and the bidders were apparently expected to carry out the due diligence. That not only places a huge burden on providers, but runs the risk that the entire process will collapse if it is not carried out correctly, as has happened elsewhere. It is worth highlighting that the National Audit Office investigation into the collapse of the UnitingCare Partnership contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough found that bidders

“faced significant difficulties in pricing their bids accurately due to limitations in the available data”.

The evidence I have seen in the documentation suggests that that is now happening.

We should all be very worried about that, because failed procurements in Staffordshire for cancer services and end-of-life care, and in Cambridge and Peterborough, had similar procurement processes to the one chosen by Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire CCG. In each case, there was a secretive process, a complex procurement methodology and a failure to engage. Together, they cost taxpayers millions, and they all failed. Instead of learning lessons, NHS Improvement and the CCG seem intent on repeating the mistakes.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Does she agree that the complexity of the procurement process and the difficulty that she—an expert in this area—is experiencing means that patients who rely on these services and workers in not-for-profit organisations, who deserve to know what the process means and what the outcomes will be for them, find it impossible to take part as important stakeholders?

[Karin Smyth]

Absolutely—I completely agree. That is why I will continue to speak up on behalf of my constituents; I know I have my hon. Friend’s support.

Predictably, I would like to finish where I began, on the issue of secrecy and a lack of transparency. As I have highlighted, this absurd behind-closed-doors approach has bedevilled the reprocurement from the off. If this is such a great change to community services, why are we not trumpeting it? Reprocurement was first referred to in governing body papers in May 2018, but other than that there has been virtually nothing. There was no official announcement, no media blitz, no news stories or television news clips, no leaflets in local GP surgeries or South Bristol Community Hospital to enable local people to have their say on the plans—nothing. Although there has been talk of consultation, it seems that only 20 people from south Bristol took part. In fairness, there were some nods to engagement, and surveys were completed by 196 people. There was an engagement planning workshop with patients, carers and the voluntary sector, but because it is a contracting process, they were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.

There is no evidence that even that limited feedback has been listened to or acted on. The workshop was merely an illustration to bidders of what stakeholders might want to identify when community services are planned and delivered. Tellingly, in documents from January, the CCG stipulated:

“Formal public consultation is not required as part of the procurement as no ‘significant variation’ to services is planned at this stage”.

Why is it being done if there is no significant variation to services?

All the documentation—approximately 300 pages in total—is hidden behind a portal, including more confidentiality agreements. The whole process appears so desperate to avoid the merest hint of engagement that it screams, “We’ve got something to hide!” It is utterly self-defeating, and serves no one well—not patients, bidders, the CCG or the community at large.

The CCG says that it is seeking a consistent service across all three areas and both acute trusts. Two of the CCGs and one of the trusts have been in deficit for years, and at various times in the past few years they have been on NHS Improvement’s naughty step. The deficits are now being shared across the whole community. The jam is being spread more thinly and differently from how it was spread before. The process is being embarked on to help spread the already struggling and inadequate level of service more thinly. Those service providers are spending money that should be spent on services on a process that I believe will inevitably reduce community services in Bristol.

I have great respect for the Minister, but I have no confidence that the Government will be able to make any difference to the local position. I hope that she takes note of the variability in how the rules are interpreted locally, as the Health and Social Care Committee noted in its response to the legislative proposals for the NHS long-term plan. Other commentators are saying the same. I hope the Minister will reflect on this local example. Will she explain directly or through her officials why, when I wrote to the Secretary of State about this originally, I got a reply from NHS Improvement? NHS Improvement is the provider regulator; this is a commissioning issue.

I believe that the Government should rapidly respond to the proposals to remove the requirement for competition under the section 75 regulations. There is no reason to wait; they need to get on with it. This saga shows that the lack of investment in NHS services remains a problem. Why not just build capacity rather than go through these expensive tendering processes with providers outside the NHS? I actually support the place-based approach to service provision in the NHS plan, but I object to the fact that this reprocurement goes counter to that plan.

At the very least, on behalf of local people, I would like the Minister to support my calls to see the proposals before contracts are signed for the next 10 years. We need a local plan and collaboration with the local authority that meets our health and social needs. I want a guarantee that people in south Bristol will not be worse off. Currently, no one can give me that.

Baby Leave for Members of Parliament

Debate between Karin Smyth and Darren Jones

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) on securing this important debate, and I thank other right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions. I also thank Mr Speaker, who I understand has made quite good progress over the past few years on this matter.

As a new Member, I had no idea that the day nursery used to be a wine bar, so the position of the nursery seems perfectly normal to me, which is good progress in itself. I declare an interest as the father of eight-week-old Ophelia and husband to my wife, Lucy. Ophelia was able to join me here for the first time to vote against the Third Reading of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Although there are those who have concerns about Members taking babies through a voting Lobby, I pay tribute to the Clerks, who astutely did not count Ophelia’s vote when I walked through—quite rightly so, given that I have no idea of her views on the Government’s Brexit strategy.

I support this important motion. When I went on paternity leave—a little earlier than expected—in the run-up to Christmas, as a Back-Bench MP, I was able to clear my diary fairly easily, and my constituents were supportive, but of course I needed to be here to vote, and there were some important matters that I wanted to vote on. We should consider the use of proxy voting. I see that the Clerks use iPads when we vote, so—dare I say it—perhaps we could use an app. If we could vote without having to nod through the Lobby, that would be welcome progress. In those early days, as my hon. Friends have said, my duty as a husband and a father was to be at home to help in any way that I can, but I had to leave for many hours to come and vote here, so it would have been helpful if I had been able to vote from home or via a proxy. Formalising the process would also be helpful, because while the Whips were accommodating, the presumption was that I would be here for all votes apart from those that I had negotiated not to attend. I would rather that that was the other way around. When there are crunch votes, such as the Brexit ones, when I am sure that Ophelia would have said that I should be here if she could, I would come to vote, but the presumption needs switching.

It is important that we set the tone in this place. We should be doing the same thing that we have legislated for in the country, which seems perfectly sensible, but we also need to set the tone. Parenting is not a gender issue—at least it should not be—and I am of the firm view that a family friendly and gender-balanced economy not just is the right thing to seek, but would be good for economic growth and wellbeing.

The House may not be surprised to hear that I think that my wife is a remarkable and talented woman—

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

She is very fortunate.

[Darren Jones]

Thank you. I say that about my wife not least because during the snap election, when we were two months pregnant, I made it clear that I stood no chance of winning and that I would be able to apply for shared parental leave in my previous job as a lawyer. To make things worse, having actually won the election when I said that I was not going to—I am honoured to be here, of course—the local BBC news team had noticed a slight bump and announced our pregnancy to 1.3 million people in the region without checking first. When we received all these text messages saying, “Congratulations!”, we thought that they were about the election, but we suddenly realised that they were about Ophelia. We had not yet had the three-month scan, so we wondered how on earth everybody knew. My wife therefore had a bit of a bumpy road on the way to becoming a mum involved with a parliamentarian.

My wife is also my constituent, and she has said that it is okay for me to share her experiences over the past year, which have been quite distressing. It has been quite difficult for me to support her. She was the director of public policy at an energy company called Open Energi, which receives Government funding, and doing very well in that senior role. After the announcement of her pregnancy, she was told that her role was no longer needed and that she was being made redundant. Having worked so hard to achieve what she had, that was very distressing for her, but she is a formidable woman, so she decided to take her employer to a tribunal.

As a litigant in person, while pregnant, she cross-examined her former employers in front of a judge, who said that since the Supreme Court had decided that fees were illegal for employment tribunals, his time was increasingly being taken up by “these type” of cases. Can Members imagine the environment and the atmosphere? As one of only two women among 10 people in the tribunal room—there is no gender balance in employment tribunal hearings or sexual discrimination cases—the experience was clearly distressing, and I have now taken up that matter with the president of the employment tribunals. My wife sadly lost that case, so perhaps we need a debate about the application of burden of proof rules in this country, because it is down to women to establish a burden of proof that discrimination could have taken place, but employers can bring forward witnesses and documents to show that it did not take place—at the time, it was said that documents did not exist—and that makes it difficult for women to bring such claims.

As a father and a husband, it is perfectly sensible for me to want to lean in. It is normal for dads to want to lean in. I want my wife to achieve her aspirations as much as possible, and we want to give our children the best upbringing together. I support the motion not just because Parliament should be in line with what is happening in the rest of the country, but because it gives us the opportunity to set the tone for what we expect in a modern Britain. We should look at reforms for companies that receive Government money and at the judiciary—perhaps at even having a gender balance—and then we could achieve change in the wider economy, too. I commend the motion to the House and look forward to supporting in any way that I can.