National Health Service

Lord Warner Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate at such an appropriate time. I share his analysis, particularly around what I see as the decline in the effectiveness of general practice. However, I want to focus on just two strategic issues: the Five Year Forward View and the funding issues; and the problem of social care and the role of local government.

First, on the forward view, everybody should be extremely grateful to Simon Stevens for the leadership that he has shown in bringing forward this document and securing such a large measure of agreement for many of the ideas in it. I very much support his approach of pointing people in a direction of travel but without what I would regard as an overcentralised, detailed game plan or a further reorganisation. The emphasis on local solutions is a big step forward but I want to draw attention to the key funding assumptions underpinning the forward view vision.

The document acknowledges what many of us have been saying for some time: that the NHS faces a £30 billion funding gap by the end of the decade. It says clearly that this can be closed only by a combination of reducing demand, increasing NHS efficiency and more generous “staged funding increases”, in its words. That is absolutely right, but whether you close that gap depends a great deal on what combination of those assumptions actually takes place. You need everything to work in order to close the funding gap entirely.

Underpinning all that is a set of assumptions about the efficiency gains that we have talked a bit about today. Under this vision, the NHS is required to achieve an annual efficiency gain of at least 2%, possibly even 3%, for five years on the trot. Its long-run performance is 0.8%, rising recently to about 1.5%, with a big chunk of that 1.5% being achieved by pay restraint—not a card that you can keep on playing year after year. Some would say, “The assumptions on efficiency in this document are heroic, Minister”. As someone who has been in this field a long time, I have to say that I cannot see the NHS sustaining that level of efficiency gain over a five-year period.

My second point concerns one of the provisos that the Five Year Forward View assumes will actually take place—that is, and this is the document’s term, “sustaining social care”. The reality is that the huge reduction in adult social care funding over the past five years has been a disaster for the NHS. The hospital “bed-blocking” that we so glibly talk about today is in large part a direct result of the draconian cuts in social care funding over that period, which, as the Dilnot commission’s report pointed out in 2011, was in any case underfunded in relation to demography even before the 2010 election. Here I should declare my interest as a member of that committee.

The continuing tightening of the eligibility criteria for social care has produced an extremely efficient pipeline of frail, elderly people for A&E departments, many of whom then seamlessly become acute hospital bed-blockers. The Better Care Fund is a belated attempt to stop the situation getting worse, but it does little to repair the damage already done and has itself been criticised for its highly bureaucratic approach by one of the Government’s own Ministers, Mr Francis Maude. I have real concerns that unless something is done to tackle the continuing shrinking of the resources for adult social care, the NHS can only get into a worse set of troubles, and many of its patients will receive a poorer service. Acute hospital medical wards are about the last place you want to leave frail elderly people who are confused.

I close by drawing attention to the issue of local government. Successive Governments have neglected local government; too often they have seen it as the problem rather than part of the solution. I hope that my party will pay attention to this problem. Attention needs to be given to the excellent report for the Labour Party by Sir John Oldham’s independent committee on treating the whole person and integrating care, and not seeing medicine as a collection of professionals attending to various body parts of the individual. Unless we can actually get real about funding and about repairing the damage done to adult social care funding and services, we are not going to make much progress in sustaining our NHS.