NHS (Private Sector)

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

The point that I am making is about how to manage the system, how to ensure proper regulation and how to ensure that NHS providers and the system work in the interests of NHS patients. If the right hon. Gentleman is arguing that there would be the same control managing the system through a series of fragmented commercial contracts, I would be interested to have that debate with him. Frankly, I do not believe that he is being serious, if that is his point.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I have been contacted by constituents who access their cancer and cardiac care from Barts and from the London hospital. They fear that as a result of the Bill their health needs will be deprioritised in favour of private patients who can afford to pay. What would my right hon. Friend say to my constituents about their fears?

[Andy Burnham]

I wish I could allay the fears of those people, but when there is a proposal placed at the heart of the NHS for hospitals to devote half their facilities—their beds, their appointments—to private patients, how is it possible to give that guarantee to those patients, particularly when the Government are relaxing the waiting time standards that we did so much to establish in the NHS, with the two-week wait for cancer referrals and 18 weeks for elective operations, and a four-hour wait in A and E? How can we have that confidence when, effectively, the Government are taking those safeguards off the public and giving the green light for a massive expansion of private sector treatment in NHS hospitals?