Oral Answers to Questions

Simon Burns Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

Access to information is a key pillar of our plans to empower patients and service users. We want to open up access to trusted health and care information to everyone, including through digital channels. Independent organisations have an important role to play in helping to ensure that health and care information reaches everyone. StartHere is a good example of how such organisations can help. I am very keen to see StartHere’s response to our consultation, “An Information Revolution”.

[Alun Michael]

I welcome the Minister’s positive response. Does he agree with me and, by the way, with Citizens Advice and the Royal British Legion that StartHere has the unique benefit of starting from the point of view of the person who needs information? It therefore increases efficiency and has the potential to save the health service money. Will he meet me to discuss how to realise those potential benefits?

[Mr Burns]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for those comments. I pay tribute to him because he has been a champion of StartHere ever since its existence. He and I agree that it is crucial that information is provided to empower patients and citizens, not all of whom have access to websites and the internet. I am more than happy to meet him to discuss this further.

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

5. What plans he has for future funding of specialist children’s hospitals.

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[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

7. What mechanisms he plans to introduce for public access to financial information about general practices under his Department’s proposals for GP commissioning.

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

Under our proposals, commissioning budgets will be held by GP-led consortiums, which will be established as statutory bodies, rather than by individual GP practices. The commissioning budgets will be distinct from the income that GP practices earn under their contracts for providing primary medical care. GP consortiums will have to make their accounts available to the public.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I welcome the Minister’s reply. As GP practices have always been treated as private partnerships and are not open to financial scrutiny or freedom of information requests, it is important that £80 billion of public spending is, in the way he describes, subject to scrutiny, including by this House.

[Mr Burns]

May I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that the NHS commissioning board will not allocate commissioning budgets directly to GP practices? Neither will they be included in either partnership or individual GP accounts. As is the situation now, those GP accounts will remain entirely separate. Our proposals set out clear lines of accountability in respect of commissioning resources. Each GP consortium must prepare a set of annual accounts, which the NHS commissioning board will include in its consolidated account. I hope that that reassures the right hon. Gentleman.

[Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

Will the Minister confirm that patients and councillors will sit on consortium boards, and that the boards will meet in public, so that there will be real transparency and accountability at the point of decision making, and accountability will not be sidelined to health and well-being boards?

[Mr Burns]

May I explain to the hon. Lady that, no, councillors will not be on the GP consortiums? They will have a full and active role to play on the health and well-being boards, so that they can take a full part in determining the local needs of the local health economy. That is the right venue for them.

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that as those commissioning consortiums are established, it will be important to ensure that they are subject to proper financial assurance, in the same way as Monitor applies such principles to foundation trusts? Can he assure the House that that will be one of the responsibilities of the NHS commissioning board?

[Mr Burns]

There is not altogether the same comparison to be made with Monitor and foundation trusts, but I certainly understand and take on board the general principle behind my right hon. Friend’s question. I think that it is important that there is accountability.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Government want to create about 500 new GP commissioning groups and scrap 150 primary care trusts, which the King’s Fund says will cost £3 billion. Yet, last year the current Prime Minister promised that

“there will be no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down re-structures… The disruption is terrible, the demoralisation worse—and the waste of money inexcusable.”

Can the Minister tell us when the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) changed his mind?

[Mr Burns]

May I begin by congratulating the hon. Lady on her elevation to this position? I know that in the past she has worked at the Department of Health, so her experience will no doubt help her Front-Bench colleagues who do not share such a background. However, she is factually wrong, although no doubt she will not be wrong in the future, because we have never said that there will be 500 consortiums. It will up to local decision making to determine how many consortiums there will be. The hon. Lady can believe what she reads in the newspapers, but if I were her I would wait to see what actually happens.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

8. What mechanisms he plans to put in place to provide for GP revalidation after the ending of primary care trusts.

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[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

15. What advice his Department provides to NHS trusts seeking to renegotiate private finance initiative contracts.

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

This Department and the Treasury provide guidance and advice to NHS schemes to maximise the savings and best value for money they can achieve when making variations to their PFI contracts for additional services or facilities, conducting market testing exercises for support services or when assessing refinancing requests from their private sector partners.

[Penny Mordaunt]

What can the Government do to assist the Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, which is under serious financial pressure because of its PFI contract, a £37 million deficit and, thanks to false planning assumptions, not enough patients to make a super hospital sustainable?

[Mr Burns]

May I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her assiduous work in her constituency? She represents her constituents and looks after their interests regarding the provision of the highest quality health care. From conversations that I have had with her, I fully appreciate her concerns about the financial situation. I understand that South Central strategic health authority is working closely with the trust as it implements a cost-improvement programme to achieve financial balance.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

16. How many diagnostic tests for cancer he expects to be carried out by the NHS in each of the next four years.

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

The Department collects waiting times and activity data on 15 key diagnostic tests, but these data do not include the reason for a diagnostic test, such as suspected cancer. The NHS carries out more than 40 million diagnostic tests per year. The cancer reform strategy review is looking at the scope to improve survival rates by increased use of some diagnostic tests.

[Angela Smith]

I thank the Minister for that answer, although it was not quite as precise as I would have liked. How will those numbers be impacted by the Government’s decision to abandon the one-week guarantee for cancer tests and their decision not to performance-manage the abandonment of the 18-week diagnostic target?

[Mr Burns]

I say in the politest way possible to the hon. Lady that we cannot abandon a target that has never been imposed in the first place. May I remind her that, as a sop to the Labour party conference more than a year ago, the former Prime Minister merely announced an aspiration? He never provided any funding or said where the funding should go, and he never provided any clinical evidence for the viability of the proposal. Saying that the Government have abandoned a target when it never existed is sheer poppycock.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

The all-party cancer group’s report last year found that those with rarer cancers got a bit of a raw deal from the NHS when it came to access to treatment and drugs. How will the new cancer fund put right that wrong?

[Mr Burns]

I am sure that my hon. Friend, through the tremendous work done by him and his colleagues on the all-party group, will appreciate that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s initiative—providing £50 million for the rest of this year and £200 million from next year for the cancer fund—is an important step forward in helping those who suffer from cancer. I am sure that my hon. Friend will also welcome the fact that work is ongoing on refining, following the review, the cancer reform strategy, and we are looking at the scope for improving survival rates by the increased use of diagnostic tests and at improving care across the board, so that we raise our standards to the highest in Europe rather than being the poor relation.

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

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[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

T4. NHS Warwickshire is consulting on the future of Bramcote hospital, which serves my constituency and the wider north Warwickshire area. That could lead to the closure of the hospital which has provided valuable intermediate care to my constituents over many years. To close the hospital, NHS Warwickshire requires the Department of Health to meet substantial impairment costs. Can the Secretary of State assure my constituents that before any decision is made by the Department to pay any such costs, the views of the local GP consortiums and local people will be taken into account?

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

As my hon. Friend says, NHS Warwickshire is consulting on the future of intermediate care at Bramcote hospital. I hope that he will engage with that consultation and that the views of local people will be taken fully into account by NHS Warwickshire in deciding the way forward. As he knows, the Secretary of State has set out various tests and NHS Warwickshire’s decision must have the support of the GP commissioners; must strengthen public-patient engagement; and must be based on sound clinical evidence. I hope that my hon. Friend is reassured that those tests will be fully taken into account as part of the consultation process.

[Mr Speaker]

The House is obliged to the Minister.

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[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

How can the Minister justify the already increasing delay in people having cancer diagnostic tests?

[Mr Simon Burns]

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman was here earlier, but we explained in great detail about the target that never existed. The latest figures show that the median time has gone from 1.7 weeks to 1.9 weeks, but that is because those figures were for the period between June and August—the holiday time—when many people changed their bookings or appointments to fit in with the school holidays or their own holidays. The figures for September are already on course to get us back to the median for that time of the year.

[Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Con)]

I know that the Secretary of State is aware of the high level of teenage pregnancies in this country, and particularly in Hastings in my constituency. What action are we going to take to support those young women? We all know of the negative health outcomes that come with those young pregnancies.