Philip Davies
Main Page: Philip Davies (Conservative - Shipley)National Health Service Bill
Philip Davies Excerpts
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. She must have very good eyesight, as I was about to come on to exactly that point. We need a planned service, not one based on competition all the time. To those who say that the private sector is only a small part of our NHS, I make three important points. First, the private sector causes enormous harm by cherry-picking profitable services. Secondly, there has been an undeniable escalation of private sector involvement since the Health and Social Care Act 2012, and the direction of travel is plain. Thirdly, material harm is being caused by the purchaser-provider split, which puts competition above co-operation and sees NHS bodies literally bidding against each other, and I simply cannot see whose interest that is in.
Caroline Lucas
No, I will not, because the hon. Gentleman has already had about two hours in which to speak this morning.
I will say a little more about each of those points. On cherry-picking, the inescapable truth is that the private sector is camping out on the NHS’s lawn. It is using all the corporate machinery available to it to pick off the low-hanging fruit—the non-urgent, easy and profitable services. The 2012 Act handed the private sector unprecedented access to NHS markets. Invited in to browse, it has predictably seized the simple, profitable work, sending complications back to the NHS to mop up any mistakes or unforeseen outcomes.
Caroline Lucas
Absolutely. It is just criminal that the money that the NHS so desperately needs to provide front-line care is going to line the pockets of private companies’ shareholders.
Caroline Lucas
No, I will not. I will not give way to a gentleman who has spent about two hours boring on this morning.
The private sector is profiting from NHS training, but it is depriving the NHS of income and removing valuable day-to-day training experience. Let us take the example of a surgeon who no longer gets to practise on scheduled elective work and who, as a result, has to refer an emergency shoulder injury to a specialist unit. It could have been dealt with at a lower level, but the experience and practice were lost.