Health and Social Care (Re-committed) Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Rosie Cooper

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

As the Minister has just confirmed by omission, there will be no power to direct and therefore no power to deliver absolutely a comprehensive, universal health service as we have come to expect and understand it. Those are the key differences. [Interruption.] The Minister can shake his head, but that is an accurate interpretation of what has happened.

[Rosie Cooper]

My hon. Friend has been talking about mandates. Will he explain under what mandate and how the Secretary of State is implementing all these structural changes? The House has not voted on them and the process started before the Bill came to the House. You are making structural changes, damaging the health service and making it impossible—

[Rosie Cooper]

Forgive me. I am for ever doing that, and I must stop. In essence, I am saying that the Secretary of State and Ministers keep talking about mandates and what they will and will not do, yet they are disregarding everything because they are implementing the Bill before it has been sanctioned by the House or the other place.

[Owen Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. As she will know, the Government have no mandate for any of these things—they were not in the manifesto, the election or the coalition agreement. There is a mandate, but not one to effect these sorts of changes. That is another disgrace given how large the changes are.

I am going to move off this issue, but I will conclude by reading back to the Government their own words, which make it absolutely clear what they are doing in getting rid of direction. Paragraph 66 of the explanatory notes states:

“Currently, the Secretary of State is directly responsible for providing or securing the provision of all health services as set out in the NHS Act, a function which is largely delegated to Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts…However, the new commissioning structure proposed by the Bill means that this would no longer be the case.”

The explanatory notes also state that

“functions in relation to the health service are conferred directly on the organisations responsible for exercising them”.

Effectively, the Secretary of State will move on and his focus will shift to public health.