NHS Counter Fraud Authority (Establishment, Constitution, and Staff and Other Transfer Provisions) (Amendment) Order 2020

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, this is a very important order. I declare my interests; I am married to a former full-time senior partner GP and I was for 12 years a member of the Public Accounts Committee, specialising in health matters.

I congratulate the Minister on bringing this forward. It is very timely. I wonder why three years was chosen rather than a Parliament, but that is not a key issue. I note, though, that paragraph 3.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum states that this applies to England only. Does that mean that there is a comparable body in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland? I hope the answer to that is “yes”—but if it is not, why on earth is it not?

I am not clear—and this goes back to my Public Accounts Committee years—who is actually auditing the work of this very important body. Is it the National Audit Office or some other organisation? Certainly, in my experience across a wide spectrum of departments and semi-independent bodies, the Comptroller and Auditor General in that organisation does a superb job and refers problem areas to the Public Accounts Committee. If the Minister is not able to answer that this afternoon, I hope he will be able to write to me.

I will raise an issue that might not be absolutely key at this point. I note that there are still too many examples of two chemists in a town trading under different names but actually belonging to the same company. The whole respect of the pharmaceutical and chemist world is basically that they get a primary payment, and that should not be happening.

Of course, at the top of my mind is the protective equipment that has had to be bought. While there were challenges there—not everything went as smoothly as I am sure the Minister would have liked—nevertheless I recognise the enormous effort that was put into providing protective equipment. But of course, when things are done at speed, inevitably there are loopholes, and I just wonder what we are doing in terms of helping this organisation to look closely at the contracts that were signed, the delivery of those contracts and whether the product was up to specification, to ensure that public money, paid for by the taxpayer, is well spent and that if the contract has not been delivered as thought, there will be not necessarily prosecution but some form of retribution repaid to this organisation.

I will ask another question that may seem strange. Is there any part of the NHS that is excluded from this organisation? It is very important that there is nobody and no part of the NHS that shall be excluded.

My noble friend Lord Bourne raised an absolutely crucial question. There is, it is rumoured—so I am told and I thank my noble friend for reminding me of this, because I did pick it up the other day—a revised strategy circulating somewhere. If there is, it seems to me that it should not be circulating for very much longer, because we really do want to know what is happening on the ground.

I will make just two further small points that are tangential to this. A colleague of mine whom I met a couple of days ago went for a test at Olympia. She was told that there was no space at Olympia and that she should go to Wellingborough—which happens to be next door to my former constituency. Upon complaint, it was discovered that there was space at Olympia. So that is a problem and a waste of resources.

In the papers over the weekend we saw the problem of past tests, where people have been cleared but there is some residue in their body that means that when the results are tested again, they come up as positive. That is another problem.

Finally, my noble friend—I do treat him as a friend, because I have known him for many years—Lord Jones has asked the right questions. How many people have been prosecuted? How many special prosecutions have there been? How many special initiatives have there been? Is my noble friend in a position to update the figures for savings that we have here?

I say again to my noble friend that we owe a huge thank you to the staff who are doing this work. It must be challenging and I hope that they are getting all the resources they need. I hope that they are getting the right skills. If they are short at all, will my noble friend confirm that, as far as he knows, they have got all the staff they need to do a first-class job?