North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Health and Secondary Care (Andrew Stephenson)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Charles. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing this important debate. He has used it to raise important questions that are vital to NHS governance—localism, transparency and accountability. He is right that patients in his constituency and the wider region should be at the forefront of decision making about their healthcare. NHS England has found that shared leadership and group working arrangements between trusts can stabilise governance and align approaches to help improvement.

[Matt Vickers (Stockton South) (Con)]

I thought that those were very legitimate questions and concerns about the way forward with mergers—joint working—but one of the issues in our part of the world is that South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was burdened by the last Labour Government with a huge PFI deal at James Cook Hospital that cost £1 million a week. That is what makes this contentious. That is what makes it so difficult to see joint working in our part of the world.

[Andrew Stephenson]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. I recognise that they are two trusts with very different characteristics. He is right about the eye-watering legacy in one trust—I think it is £57 million a year of PFI debt—which can make joint working controversial. However, as I will come on to say, I have been assured that the two trusts want to work together with joint arrangements, but not merge. I hope we can set the record clearly: in doing the research behind this speech, I have heard that this is not the prelude to a merger through the back door; rather, it is about trusts wanting to work together to address the healthcare needs in the area.

It is right that any decisions about shared leadership arrangements are made in Stockton, not Westminster. However, where an NHS trust is facing performance challenges, the Government back targeted interventions by NHS England, bringing the trusts together to properly diagnose the problem and develop an improvement plan, which could include shared leadership. Any leadership changes should be kept under constant review to ensure that they are effectively delivering for patients and the local area. The point is to help challenged trusts to improve and take ownership of local issues. External evaluations of NHS England’s leadership interventions have found them to be effective.

I will address the current leadership arrangements of the North and South Tees trusts. Up and down the country, trust governance fits a variety of different frameworks. As the hon. Member for Stockton North knows, putting a round peg in a square hole is pointless. However, although we support a diversity of models, I am crystal clear that every arrangement should be geared towards building a faster, simpler and fairer NHS that works for both patients and staff. I am happy to assure him that, in this instance, I have been assured that the shared leadership and joint working arrangements are not in any way a precursor to trust mergers or acquisitions. In other words, both trusts intend to remain statutory organisations in their own right.

NHS England promotes those models of working to maintain consistency within trusts and to ensure that everyone is on the same page when lessons are being learned. However, for over 10 years now, North and South Tees trusts have been discussing how to work together to provide a better offer for the people of Stockton.