National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between Philip Davies and John Pugh

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh]

If the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) wished to talk about that, we could happily move away from the internal market where local circumstances required and demanded it. That would be an entirely sensible policy. I see no reason, though, why health boards should not procure goods and services based on simple best-value principles without all the competition legislation that has been vilified in the debate. They should be funded—as most services are—by capitation and according to local need, and they should be in some way democratically accountable, and I think we can get a genuine public service element back into the NHS. However, not every political party is advocating that at the moment, and some are steering in quite the opposite direction.

[Philip Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful speech, as is typical of him. Does he agree that what we are dealing with today is an Opposition party in desperate straits that knows exactly what it is doing in using the word “privatisation”? It knows that people out in the country associate it with having to buy private health care, but actually nobody is proposing to change the fundamental ethos of the NHS, which is that treatment is free at the point of need. The Labour party is conflating the two as a desperate political tactic.

[John Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman is not altogether wrong, but if we are to continue to deliver, in stressed circumstances, a service that is free at the point of need, we cannot run the NHS as an internal market for ever. In fact, the NHS is already trying to morph into something different. We now have health and wellbeing boards, which mean that commissioners and providers get together to try to agree a local plan. They are struggling in every way to behave like a health board, but they do not have the executive powers to do so. There has been the move away from tariffs, which have been used to try to adjust the market, and we are now talking about whole-treatment costs. There is also talk about integration.

What is clearly entirely disruptive, though, is the intrusion of competition where it is not needed—where it is simply dogma; where it is seen as a panacea for producing good results, whether or not there is a good case for saying that; where it derails sustainable services; or where it becomes a central operating principle of the NHS. None of those things is particularly helpful.

I do not want to comment on TTIP, because I do not think it is well understood at the moment, but we will certainly need to look at how it plays into the competition agenda.

Tobacco Packaging

Debate between Philip Davies and John Pugh

Thursday 28th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

The Minister says that this is a complex matter, but I am a bit puzzled. What exactly is the downside of plain packaging, apart from fewer fags being sold?

[Philip Davies]

A left-wing, nanny state wallah like you would not understand.

Alcohol Strategy

Debate between Philip Davies and John Pugh

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton.

As a libertarian and a believer in individual freedoms, I had hoped that the country had escaped from the nanny-state health police with the end of the previous Labour Government but, sadly, I was clearly naive in that thought. A great many people in the House seem to want to do nothing else but ban everyone else from doing all the things that they do not happen to like themselves, and I was certainly not brought into politics to do that. I urge the Minister not to be seduced by the reasonableness of my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), because I assure her that, were she to implement everything that my hon. Friend asked for today, my hon. Friend and the health zealots would still return with another list of things that they want the Minister to do. Such people will never be appeased or satisfied until alcohol has been banned altogether.

I want to focus on two points—the futile proposal on minimum pricing, and advertising and marketing. The very principle of minimum pricing goes against all my Conservative instincts and beliefs—the free market and freedom of choice. The process of setting a minimum price is predicated on the assumption that raising the price of alcohol will make those who misuse alcohol behave differently. However, that is an incredibly simplistic belief. It is worrying that people in the Chamber think that, by increasing the price of a bottle of wine by 30p or 40p, or of a can of beer by 40p, all the problems associated with drinking would at a stroke disappear. People who think that minimum pricing will stop young people going into town centres on Friday and Saturday nights with the intention of getting bladdered, or whatever the current term is, are living in cloud cuckoo land.

[John Pugh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will not give way, because plenty of other people want to speak and time is pressing. I will happily debate with the hon. Gentleman in the Tea Room or at some other point, although I am the only one arguing from this perspective, I suspect.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research conducted research on minimum pricing and concluded that the heaviest drinkers are the least responsive to higher prices. For example, at a minimum unit price of 40p, the CEBR found that harmful drinkers, which the policy is supposed to be targeting, would reduce their weekly consumption by only 1.7 units per week, which at the end of the day is less than one pint of weak beer. A report by Sheffield university found that a minimum price of 45p per unit would trigger a 6% fall in overall alcohol consumption and 60 fewer deaths in the first year alone. Yet the Government figures for 2009-10 show that overall alcohol consumption fell by 7%, while alcohol-related deaths rose by 36. Clearly, there is no link between the two.

Minimum pricing treats all drinkers the same, and penalises—financially and practically—the overwhelming majority of adults, all those people who drink alcohol responsibly and in a socially acceptable way, causing harm neither to themselves nor to others. The people who would be most penalised by minimum pricing are those who are already on tight budgets, such as pensioners, people on fixed incomes or those in low-paid jobs. I simply cannot understand how hon. Members, in a time of economic austerity, are prepared to force some of their poorest constituents to pay more for alcohol, when they know full well that the overwhelming majority of those constituents drink alcohol responsibly and in moderation. If hon. Members want to tackle binge drinking and alcoholism, they should focus their efforts on binge drinkers and alcoholics, not on everyone in the country, which would be unjustifiable.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a report on minimum pricing that found that poorer households, compared with richer households, on average pay less for a unit of off-sale alcohol. For example, households with an income of less than £10,000 a year pay 39.8p per unit, while those on a household income of more than £70,000 pay 49.3p per unit on average. As a result, a minimum price of 40p or 45p per unit would have a larger impact on poorer households and virtually no impact on richer ones.