Open Public Services White Paper

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Andrew Love

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

I hope very much that trade unions will play a role. In conjunction with Cabinet colleagues, I am holding a series of meetings with public service unions to discuss how they can help to design some of the details of the reforms so that they will work better.

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

The White Paper includes a commitment to promoting mutuals and co-operatives, but, as many Labour Members have pointed out, the rhetoric does not quite match the reality. The reality is that the diversity of which the right hon. Gentleman talks does not include alternative structures. What will he do to enable mutuals and co-operatives to compete for public services on a level playing field with all the other organisations?

[Mr Letwin]

The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), is taking a series of steps not just to enable, but to promote mutualisation and co-operatives across the whole range of public services. [Interruption.] I beg the hon. Gentleman to give us a little time. That action is already beginning to work, and I think that in four years’ time he will see a vast field of mutuals and co-operatives working constructively throughout public services.

We want to be strictly neutral. We want to favour providers of all kinds—mutuals, co-operatives, voluntary sector organisations, community groups, private sector bodies and, of course, the public sector itself—if they can provide the best possible services for users of those services. That is our aim.

Departmental Business Plans

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Andrew Love

Monday 8th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly an apprentice of the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), because that was the most marvellous manipulation of statistics. We propose to reduce the number of Members of Parliament, but the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) describes that as an increase in the proportion of Ministers to the number of Members of Parliament. That is a very strange way of describing the situation. We are keeping the number of Ministers constant in order to ensure that we can impose political will on the machine to get the fundamental reforms that give power out to the people of this country. That goal is far more important than particular numbers of Ministers.

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

Following on from that question, the Minister has said several times this afternoon that he wants to increase power locally, yet the Government have just published a report on waste that implies that if they want to do something serious, they will need to recentralise powers, such as by forcing primary care trusts to act together and forcing local authorities to act together. Is there not a contradiction in those two things?

[Mr Letwin]

In brief, no: we are not attempting to do what the hon. Gentleman describes. We believe that by placing the power of commissioning in the hands of general practitioners, by giving GPs and patients genuine choice over where patients go, and by making hospitals accountable on those choices by transforming them into foundation trusts, we can achieve the efficiencies that are needed in our health service through the medium of competition, which leads to the excellence that can be generated when professionals are able to run their own show. We are moving in exactly the opposite direction from that which the hon. Gentleman describes.