National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Nicholas Dakin Excerpts

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

I hope the hon. Gentleman does not mind, but I am going to make some progress.

Never before have we had market tendering of the health service as we have today, and it is breaking down our NHS. The Bill is not a solution to all the mistakes that this Government have made in their top-down restructuring of the NHS, but it is an important block on enforced privatisation. The argument can be simplified into two distinct sides. If people believe the NHS should be a pure market, open to competition regulations, where the interests of competition are put before those of patients, they belong on the side of the Government. If people believe the NHS is a public service that should be free of competition rules, where the interests of patients are put first, they should vote for the Bill today.

We know that No. 10 did not understand what was going on in 2012. The Chancellor was asleep at the wheel, and the Liberal Democrats, suffering from some form of terminal Stockholm syndrome, were led by the nose to turn the NHS from a public service into a free market. My Bill takes a scalpel to cut the heart out of the hated 2012 Act and put right the worst of the Government’s mistakes. It will remove the sections that require the tendering of NHS services for competition with the private sector, the result of which has been millions of pounds being diverted from patient care into the pockets of lawyers and accountants through the tendering process. NHS bodies are spending millions either bidding or managing bidding processes, and that is all money being diverted from patient care. That must stop, and this Bill will end it.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the Bill’s progress today. Does he agree with my constituent Julian Corlett, who expresses real concern that further privatisation would mean the NHS may be reduced simply to a brand and nothing more?