National Health Service

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, as this is a general debate on the NHS, I remind the House of my interests as a consultant trainer with Cumberlege Connections and president of GS1. As I am going to raise the Cancer Drugs Fund, I also declare that a relative of mine, Joe Wildy, is an employee in the government affairs department of Sanofi.

I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Turnberg on securing the debate and on the quality and breadth of his opening speech. It is clearly timely; never has the health and social care system been under so much pressure.

As many noble Lords have suggested, this pressure can only grow with technological and medical advances, and the sheer fact that the number of those aged over 80 will double by 2037. Implicit in the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, is the question of whether a comprehensive service is still feasible and affordable. I have no doubt that it is but nor do I doubt the scale of the change that the NHS must effect to ensure that sustainability. I have identified seven key areas of change. First, we have to undo the damage caused by the Government’s 2012 Act without undergoing a huge restructuring, as my noble friend Lady Wall said. Secondly, we have to ensure a sustainable funding regime for the NHS and social care. Thirdly, we have to integrate health, mental health and social care. Fourthly, we have to invest in and re-energise primary care. Fifthly, we need a much more assertive public health programme. Sixthly, we need more personalised care and innovation and, seventhly, we have to invest in and support a workforce to help us transform services.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the 2012 Act has been pretty much a disaster. Despite all the protestations of Ministers, a huge amount of money has been spent and services have been fragmented, and too much energy is spent by all the players simply trying to keep the new system’s head above water. At a time of real crisis in emergency services, it is palpably clear that no one is in charge locally or nationally. My noble friends Lady Jay and Lady Wilkins, and the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, identified the buck-passing of responsibility between a mishmash of clinical commissioning groups, commissioning support units, local area teams and health and well-being boards, which are all quite unable to show the required leadership.

It is the same at national level. Ministers, the Department of Health, NHS England, the NHS Trust Development Authority, Monitor and the CQC vie with each other, often conflict and certainly provide no clear leadership. No wonder the National Audit Office commented in November that it is not at all clear where responsibility for strategic change lies. Quite! It is not surprising that performance is problematic. The Government inherited an NHS that was meeting the then 98% four-hour A&E target. They reduced that to 95% but hospital A&Es have missed that target for 76 weeks, with many hospitals in the last two weeks declaring major incidents. It is clear that the service is under extreme pressure.

On resources, never has the NHS had to cope with a flat-line budget—which is essentially what it is—for such a long time in its history. The recent NAO report on the financial sustainability of the NHS makes for sober reading, as does NHS England’s Five Year Forward View. My noble friend Lord Liddle pointed out that the Chancellor’s intention to reduce public expenditure to 35% of GDP by the end of the Parliament means that the actual resources going to the NHS will be bleak indeed.

I want to ask the noble Earl about an aspect of the immediate funding problem, which concerns the Cancer Drugs Fund. In August last year, the Government announced additional funds for the CDF to ensure that as many people as possible could access these pioneering, life-enhancing drugs. However, I understand that six months later NHS England is poised to remove that access for unknown thousands of patients. What is the Government’s policy on the CDF?

I ask the noble Earl yet again about the money now being paid back by the pharmaceutical industry to underpin the cost of certain drugs, subject to a modest inflation figure every year. Where is this money being spent? Why is it not being spent on new medicines and new treatments, where surely it ought to go? Is it a fact that NHS England does not accept the agreement that the department reached, and that is why it is not playing ball in ensuring that the money is invested where surely it ought to be invested?

On funding, my party has committed itself to a £2.5 billion Time to Care fund. We also want to remove some of the wasteful costs of the current restructuring. However, we should listen to my noble friend Lord Warner on the gap identified by NHS England. The fact is that the 3% efficiency target is formidable, or heroic, as he said. We will have to tackle this one way or another.

We also have to tackle the integration of physical health, mental health and social services. We need personal care plans and a single point of contact. We can see the current problems, which my noble friend Lady Wall identified. We see the fruits of a lack of integration. First, adult care has been impossibly squeezed. This has forced frail older people to rely on the NHS as the provider of last resort. It also means much less support for people when they are ready for discharge from hospital. Delays then happen, with longer lengths of stay. That is the problem we face. Without a properly resourced social care system, and without integration, we are not going to be able to move away from it.

Then there is primary care. Is it any wonder that A&Es throughout the country—recently the Great Western trust in the south-west, the Walsall trust in the Midlands and the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford—are having to warn patients to stay away? It is no wonder when people find it so difficult to see their GP. In the east Midlands, the CCG in Erewash reported that one in five patients had to wait a week for a doctor’s appointment. Barnsley Hospital in South Yorkshire recently surveyed patients, many of whom complained about difficulties in getting a local GP appointment. This has to be tackled. I remind the Minister that whatever one says about the contract, the fact is that this was not a problem in 2010, even though the period between 1997 and 2010 had seen a steady increase in the number of patients coming through the door.

Investment in primary care has definitely fallen behind, and a workforce crisis is emerging. One good start would be for the Secretary of State to desist from his thoughtless attacks on GPs. We have pledged to use part of our £2.5 billion Time to Care fund to recruit more GPs, but we need to do much more to bring GPs into the core of the system. I remind the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that when Andrew Lansley proposed the 2012 reforms, he said that the reason was that, “GPs spend all the money and we want to give them the levers because that will effect change”. However, the huge gap in the system is that clinical commissioning groups seem to have no impact whatever on the performance and behaviour of GPs. I thought that that was the whole purpose of delegating budgets to CCGs. The reason, of course, is that the contract is held with NHS England, which has been quite unable to impact on the performance of GPs.

My noble friend Lord Rea talked about public health. I certainly agree with him and NHS England on its five-year plan. It says that we need a radical upgrade in prevention and public health. It says that it will back hard-hitting national action on obesity, smoking, alcohol and other major health risks. That is very welcome. The question I would ask the noble Earl, Lord Howe, is whether the Government will let NHS England do that—because I have to say that the Government’s record on public health has been very disappointing indeed.

There is one other area that I have time to mention: the adoption of innovation in the National Health Service. The noble Earl knows that he and I share the concern about the slowness of the NHS to adopt new treatments and new medicines. Surely, given our fantastic life sciences, and the strength of our pharma and medical devices industries, we have to find a way to encourage the NHS to move to adoption much more quickly than heretofore. I certainly hope that in his winding-up speech he can say a little more about how we are going to do that.