Health and Social Care (Re-committed) Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Alison Seabeck

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I entirely agree, and my faith is diminishing by the minute. I do not understand why the Government cannot simply concede that they have signally failed to deal with this crucial aspect of the Bill. It took them months to produce the revised failure regime. They managed to drag that out in time for Report, but they have not produced the impact assessment, they have not produced any figures showing how much this will cost the public purse, although we know that the amount is rising—I should love the Minister to tell us by how much—and they have not produced a solution to the crucial problem of staff training and work force planning. That is a disgrace. They could have and should have done it by now.

New clause 13 would place a further duty on providers, related to what is in the earlier new clause. It would oblige them to make provision for training and work force planning for their own staff, thus filling another gaping hole in the Bill. As the Minister might say if he intervened on me, Monitor may well have powers, under the pricing clauses, to pay less under the tariff to providers who do not engage in training, but nothing in the Bill compels new entrants—especially private providers—to give their staff any training, or to deal with any costs that the NHS has traditionally had to bear for the education of the work force.

We all know that in the incredibly fast-moving and innovative world of health care, keeping staff up to date is absolutely crucial. That is why—I hate to say it—despite the news that we are to have an amendment ín the Lords, we will attempt to press amendment 7 to a vote. It proposes the retention of SHAs until and unless we know precisely what the Government will put in their place in respect of training and administration.

NHS staff is another group that is profoundly concerned by the shambles, chaos and confusion that Ministers have overseen. Under the Bill, they are described as assets and will be transferred lock, stock and barrel between new providers. The new providers may be a private company—such as Helios, Bupa, UnitedHealth, or whoever else decides it is interested in running the NHS in future—and the staff may be transferred to the new providers. The Minister shrugs, suggesting that that is a misrepresentation, so I challenge him to intervene on me and state what he seemed to imply earlier: that what I have just said is not the case.

Schedule 23 makes that explicit, however. It provides for the transfer of NHS staff and other assets. It allows such so-called assets to be passed in future from NHS entities to the new CCGs. That can happen to any

“person who provides services as part of the health service in England and consents to the transfer”.

Under schedule 23, any NHS member of staff—or a building or intellectual property—can, so long as they agree, be transferred to anybody else who is licensed to provide services to the NHS. I find that extraordinary, but not quite as extraordinary as the next provision, which refers to NHS bodies being able to transfer all such assets—what a delightful way to refer to people—to a “qualifying company”, whatever that means. I will be delighted if the Minister tells us what the term “qualifying company” in schedule 23 means.

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend join me in sharing the concerns of many public health consultants in this regard? They sometimes cover three areas of work, so in one area they could go to the commissioning board, in another they could go to children’s health commissioning, and in another area of their job they could go to the local authority. What are those people supposed to do? I suspect some of them will leave the service.