NHS Risk Register

Debate between Liz Kendall and Tony Baldry

Wednesday 22nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall]

I notice that the Secretary of State does not deny that members of his own Cabinet and Conservative and Liberal Democrat Back Benchers are concerned about the Bill.

Instead of fighting among themselves, the Government should be relentlessly focused on ensuring that the NHS meets the challenges of the future. Our ageing population, the increase in long-term conditions, and the huge medical and technical advances mean that the NHS must continue to change to improve patient care and deliver better value for taxpayers’ money. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) said, that means shifting the focus of services into the community and more towards prevention, so that people stay fit and healthy for longer. It means centralising some health services in specialist centres so that patients benefit from medical advances and get the best standards of care. It also means ensuring that local NHS and council services work together so that older and disabled people can stay living independently in their own home.

The NHS needs service reform, not structural reform. The Bill will make the changes impossibly hard to achieve. The recent Health Committee report on social care states that the best examples of integrated services have been achieved by care trusts, which were set up under the Labour Government, and yet those are being swept away by the Bill. In 2009, NHS London centralised stroke services into eight hyper-acute units. That decision was very controversial at the time, but within six months it had more than tripled the number of patients getting vital clot-busting drugs to the highest rate of any large city in the world. The Bill will put strategic service changes such as that at risk.

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

What about the risk register?

[Liz Kendall]

I have outlined what local NHS services have said about the risk register. If the hon. Gentleman had been in the debate earlier, he would have heard Government Members saying that we are not focusing on patient care or setting out how the NHS needs to change. The point that I am making is that the Bill will prevent the strategic changes that the NHS needs.

There is no evidence that smaller, GP-led commissioning groups can deliver major changes to hospital services. The organisations that have done so, such as NHS London, are being abolished. The real risk is that the full, free and unfettered market that will be introduced by part 3 of the Bill will stop the NHS from making the changes that patients desperately need. It risks preventing hospitals from working together to centralise stroke or trauma care; it risks preventing hospitals from running local community services or working with GPs and local councils to better integrate care, for fear that they will fall foul of UK and EU competition law; and it risks putting power into the hands not of patients and clinicians, but of lawyers and the courts.