Health and Care Bill

Debate between Margaret Greenwood and Diane Abbott

Report stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill has the sense of being an NHS corporate takeover Bill? We have already seen £5 billion in contracts being awarded to private companies through the VIP lane. The Bill opens the door to private corporations sitting on 42 local health boards. That is wrong.

[Margaret Greenwood]

I thank my right hon. Friend for putting the case so clearly. She hits the nail absolutely on the head: as a result of the Bill, contracts could be handed out to the private sector without the stringent arrangements that one would expect in the awarding of public money. That is a recipe for the kind of cronyism that has become all too familiar, as she says.

I turn to the cap on care costs. I was proud to stand on a manifesto in 2019 that pledged to

“build a comprehensive National Care Service for England”,

to include

“free personal care, beginning with investments to ensure that older people have their personal care needs met, with the ambition to extend this provision to all working-age adults.”

The Conservative manifesto in 2019 did not go that far, but it at least made the guarantee that

“nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it.”

We now know that that was a sham—another broken promise by this Government.

Last week, Ministers sneaked out changes to social care plans that would mean that poorer pensioners will not after all be able to count means-tested payments by the state for their care towards a total cap of £86,000 for any individual. The Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), described it as “deeply disappointing” that the new plans were “not as progressive” as those put forward by Andrew Dilnot, the economist who drew up the original plans for a cap on individual contributions. Mr Dilnot has said that the Government’s plan is

“a big change that…finds savings exclusively from the less well-off group.”

A former Conservative Cabinet Minister has urged the Government

“to adopt a different approach”,

while another Conservative MP, a former Under-Secretary of State for Health, has said that

“it will be poorer pensioners who have relatively modest assets that will be most affected by these changes.”

I hope that Members on the Government Benches are listening to those points from Government as well as Opposition Members and will do the right thing. Elderly people deserve better. All Members, including Government Members, have a responsibility to vote these measures down.

When the Prime Minister was discharged from hospital in April 2020, having spent seven nights there, of which three were in intensive care, he said that

“the NHS has saved my life, no question.”

Now he and his Government should save the NHS by withdrawing the Bill. The national health service is this country’s greatest social achievement. It is devastating that this Conservative Government are intent on taking it off us.