Future of Health and Care

Lord Curry of Kirkharle Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I will indeed share my noble friend’s tribute to the vaccination programme and to Bedford Hospital for saving Lady Naseby’s life, for which we are all enormously grateful. However, I would probably leave his company on his remarks on GPs; they are extremely effective in the service they provide to their local communities. The patient satisfaction surveys do not support his contention that there is a massive gap there.

We are committing to building new hospitals in order to expand our capacity, but the essence of the measures in this Bill is more about prevention, population health and supporting better outcomes for the kind of public health measures around things such as obesity that ensure that people do not have to spend their time in hospital when they feel ill and, instead, have an early-stage intervention.

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]]

My Lords, my interests are recorded in the register. This White Paper and proposed Bill are extremely welcome and long overdue, and I very much support the direction of travel. I have been curious and interested to read that reducing unnecessary bureaucracy in the process of change is a key plank of the White Paper. I am interested in how the Minister expects this to be achieved; as a former chair of the Better Regulation Executive, I know how difficult this is. Will there by some form of oversight to ensure that this does take place, and some way of monitoring that fact as well?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a very wise observation. The challenge of reducing bureaucracy has confounded many Ministers in the past, and I would not want to suggest in any way that this is an easy challenge. However, it is our belief that, by getting those involved in primary, secondary and social care, and in public health, working more closely together in integrated care systems, with a culture of collaboration and clearer accountability for the outcomes of the populations in their areas, we can reduce the friction of paperwork, duplication and oversight that has cost the health system dearly, and can build a more effective way of providing healthcare services for individual populations.