NHS: Five Year Forward View

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

I thank my noble friend for repeating the Statement. I echo the point that, while many of us on all sides of the House may have disagreed with some of the structural changes in the Health and Social Care Act, the last thing the health service wants is another structural reorganisation. The plan by the party opposite to scrap the Health and Social Care Act is a real worry to many professionals. I say to my noble friend that no matter how much money the Chancellor promised today, it will not be enough to meet the demands of a changing healthcare system, where we are seeing, year on year, because of the success of the NHS, people living longer and with lots of different comorbidities.

I have a concern about the Statement. I actually think that Simon Stevens’s report is an excellent report and one that should have united this House rather than dividing us. After all, his pedigree comes from working with the Labour Party on the early reforms in the last Parliament. What really worries me is that neither in Simon Stevens’s report, nor in the Statement, is there a mention of the other crucial element, which is the workforce. The workforce and, indeed, the work of Health Education England, is not even worth a mention in the Statement—yet it is the 500,000 nurses and the 1.4 million care workers who bind the health and care system together and who will deliver the integrated health and social care which all of us in this House want to see.

Will my noble friend make it clear today that no savings will be made by reducing Health Education England’s budget? Will he state clearly that there will be investment in the skills of our staff in order that Simon Stevens’s plan actually works and that we can make it a realisation rather than a hope?

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is absolutely right. One of the critical elements of the Five Year Forward View is to ensure that we have the right number of staff with the right qualifications in the right places. While Health Education England is the body charged with ensuring that that happens, it is up to us in government to ensure that there is adequate funding to enable it to do that. I can assure my noble friend that Ministers are very clear that Health Education England should be fully supported to deliver the programme that it has mapped out for itself. That programme is an exciting one. It involves more doctors and nurses in training over the next few years. Our ambition is to see by 2020 an extra 10,000 people working in primary care, for example—and that is only one detail.

As a result of the Government’s reforms to the health service, we have been able to afford a large number of extra posts in front-line care, including doctors and nurses in both primary and secondary care. We have done that by reducing the number of administrators in the system—20,000 fewer than there were in 2010. My noble friend is right to draw attention to this issue; it is one that is very much in our focus.