NHS Reorganisation

Debate between Nick de Bois and John Healey

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

Let me send the hon. Gentleman a copy of the Labour manifesto, because we set out exactly how we could make significant savings from the bureaucracy.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

rose—

[John Healey]

I am just responding to the hon. Gentleman’s colleague, so I ask him to be patient. We set out exactly how we could reduce the costs and some of the bureaucracy. Perhaps the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) could ask his Front-Bench colleagues how bureaucracy will be cut when the function currently carried out by 150 primary care trusts in England will be carried out instead by more than double that number of general practitioner consortia.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Nick de Bois and John Healey

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

rose—

[John Healey]

The public are being told that the reorganisation is “patient centred”, but patients are being sold a false promise on the NHS. The changes in the Bill come in only in 2013, but patients are already seeing the consequences of the Government’s handling of the health service. The Government have scrapped Labour’s waiting time targets, which were, of course, the patients’ guarantee of being seen and treated promptly. They are breaking the Prime Minister’s promise of a real increase in NHS funding, so Scotland is being short-changed next year by £70 million and Wales is being short-changed next year by £40 million. England, if we take out the double counting of cash to be spent on social care rather than on NHS services, faces a shortfall next year of £1.2 billion on the Prime Minister’s promise.

With this Bill, the Government are now breaking their promise to stop top-down internal reorganisations and they are putting extra unnecessary pressure on the NHS. Patients are starting to see waiting times rise; they are starting to see discharges from hospital delayed; they are starting to see wards mothballed and staff posts cut. That is not what people expected when the Prime Minister promised to protect the NHS. The Prime Minister’s most personal pledge to the public is becoming his biggest broken promise.

[Nick de Bois]

Will the right hon. Gentleman try to understand—[Interruption.] Perhaps he will. Members suggest that this is ideological. I do not see how it is ideological not to repeat the gross error of 2008-09 when, under the right hon. Gentleman’s watch, managers were recruited at five times the rate of nurses working on the front line—which is not ideological either, and does not serve patients.

[John Healey]

This is ideological. It is about driving politics into the heart of the NHS, and in some respects breaking what has been a 60-year consensus. Parties on all sides have tried to make decisions about the best interests of patients and better services, and not about their own political ideologies. That has changed today, with this Bill.

NHS Reorganisation

Debate between Nick de Bois and John Healey

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

In a way it does not matter whether I agree; it matters much more that the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society and many other patients groups are deeply concerned about this.

It is not just patients groups but professional bodies and NHS experts who are worried. Even the GPs are not convinced, and they are meant to be the winners in all this. They are meant to be the ones planning, buying and managing the rest of the NHS’s services. A King’s Fund survey carried out last month found that fewer than one in four GPs believe that the plans will improve patient care, and only one in five believe that the NHS will be able to maintain the focus on efficiency at the same time.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

In my constituency, we have been holding one-to-one dialogues with GPs, particularly about the White Paper, and I can tell the right hon. Gentleman with total confidence that well over 65% of the GPs I have met—it is only 65% because I have not managed to meet all of them—have endorsed the removal of the PCTs, from which they felt remote and disjointed and from which they felt they were getting poor value for money.

[John Healey]

If two thirds of the GPs the hon. Gentleman met are in favour, one third are obviously not convinced, but they will be forced to do this anyway. That is part of the problem, and I will come to that in a moment.

It is no wonder that the head of the NHS Confederation, the body that is there for those who run the NHS, told the Health Committee last month that

“there is a very, very significant risk associated with the project”.

Even the Secretary of State’s right-wing supporters in the Civitas think-tank tell him that he is wrong. They have said:

“The NHS is facing the most difficult…time in its history. Now is not the time for ripping up internal structures yet again on scant evidence”.