Future of the NHS

Simon Burns Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

Let me help the hon. Lady. For the first time, all parts of the NHS, including the commissioning job, will be opened up to private companies and subject to competition. As I have said, independent sector treatment centres played a part in our being able to clear long waiting lists and restore the quality of service to the NHS, as well as in supplementing the mainstream NHS, not substituting for it, which is what will happen under her party’s Bill.

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

Just for the sake of balance, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that such treatment centres were also prime cherry-pickers and that between 2003 and 2009, the private sector was paid £250 million for not carrying out a single operation?

[John Healey]

The right hon. Gentleman will know from his current position that the premium that we paid in the first wave of treatment centres was stopped in the second wave. He will also know that by the end of our period in government we had stopped the independent treatment centres programme; and he ought to know that built into his Bill’s impact assessment is what it calculates to be a 14% premium, paid to providers under his proposals.

[Mr Burns]

indicated dissent.

[John Healey]

It is in the impact assessment; I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman take a good look at it.

--- Later in debate ---

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

At the instigation of the Opposition, we have spent the past three hours debating the future of the national health service, and yet in not one single speech from their Members did we hear any mention of what they would do for the future of the NHS. We heard from the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), who is always a joy to listen to. He objected to the Blair/Brown health service reforms and to our proposals to improve the NHS, apparently without fully understanding them. We heard speeches from the hon. Members for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) and for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) that were simply a continuation of what we had to listen to for eight long weeks in the Bill Committee.

We had a sensible and reasonable speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell). My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) made an interesting speech and was right—absolutely right—to encourage the greater integration and seamless provision of social care and health care, because that is so important.

We had an excellent speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), which was based on his experiences of having worked in the national health service, and we had a good speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who raised a number of questions. Time does not permit me to answer them all, but I remind him that, because of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, the Care Quality Commission started an unannounced investigation of nursing in hospitals to look specifically at dignity, respect and safety.

During this debate there have been times when the facts seem to have been obscured, so it is time that we had a reality check: our population is ageing—in 20 years’ time 2.5 million people will be over the age of 85; the cost of new medicines has almost doubled in the past 10 years, from £6.7 billion to £11.9 billion, rising last year alone by £600 million; and new surgical procedures are breathtakingly effective but expensive.

Those are the pressures facing the NHS at a time of economic turmoil inflicted on this country by the previous Labour Government. As a result, there are real challenges that the NHS must meet, so it does no one any good to scream “privatisation” as soon as we start exploring the best ways to safeguard the health of our children and of our children’s children. It is scaremongering of the lowest order, because this Government will never privatise the NHS. We have been, and we always will be, committed to an NHS free at the point of use for all eligible to use it.

In fact, when the Labour party was in government, it introduced private companies into the NHS on a scale that would have produced howls of outrage if we had done the same, but it was not privatisation then and it is not privatisation now. The previous Labour Government gave £4.7 billion to private companies in 2009-10 alone, and, unbelievably, to add insult to injury, £250 million of that money was given to private providers as payment for operations that never even happened.

We want to see a much fairer relationship, one that does not undermine the NHS but means increased choice for patients and better outcomes. That means saving thousands of lives every single year from conditions such as heart disease, respiratory disease and cancer. It means people with long-term conditions having their quality of life revolutionised with the seamless provision of care; the care that people receive being as good it possibly can be, based not on percentages or pie charts but on people’s real experiences; and the relationship between patients and doctors being humanised rather than seen as a means to an end—a relationship of equals based on trust, transparency and the best available treatment from the best available provider.

Every sensible-thinking person in the House knows that patient care can be improved if the NHS becomes more efficient. Efficient treatment is faster, cheaper and more effective. The previous Government knew that as well. We are carrying on their plans for £20 billion of efficiencies, plans that the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) brought in, whereby every penny saved will be reinvested in patient care.

To those who say that the plans are happening too fast, let me remind them that this coalition Government are giving the NHS an extra year to find those efficiencies, over and above what the Opposition would have allowed. On top of that, we are protecting front-line spending and, in fact, increasing the NHS budget overall in real terms.

We also want to see the quality of our clinical care improve so that a patient’s care will be among the best in the world, whatever they are being treated for. But these are not just pretty words and noble intentions; we are making real changes and patients can already see a real difference.

We are removing layers of unnecessary management so that clinicians have the freedom to look after in-patients rather than inboxes, and there are examples of improvements in care throughout the country. To look at just one, Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital has invested in an electronic blood transfusion system that cuts the time taken by staff to deliver blood and reduces transfusion errors to improve services for patients. That saves the NHS £1 million every year to reinvest in patient care, because it is more efficient. That is the reality of efficiency, and it goes hand-in-hand with innovative, forward-thinking care.

Underpinning all our plans is the philosophy that a more integrated NHS is a better NHS—ending stop-start care and making sure that, from the point of diagnosis, every patient has seamless care that spans health care, social care, mental health care and, of course, a reliable support network afterwards so that patients can just concentrate on getting better.

We want GPs and other health care professionals, social care providers and local councils to come together to provide seamless services, whereby, for the patient, the lines drawn between those organisations fade to nothing. Giving autonomy to clinicians, in the form of consortia, will allow that to happen, and I hope that that reassures my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes.

Let us ask Dr Howard Stoate, who some Members might remember was Labour MP for Dartford until last May. [Interruption.] I know that the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) does not like this, but she will have to listen to it once again, because he is leading pathfinder consortia in Bexley. GPs such as Dr Stoate take a broader, more responsible view of care, working with others throughout the country and across primary, community and secondary care to manage, treat and refer their patients.

They are all in an ideal position to design services in collaboration with all the different strands of the NHS and, of course, with those beyond the NHS as well. Patients, who will have their own personal care budgets to spend how they like, will be involved every step of the way.

As I have said before, everyone knows that the NHS has to change. The noble Lord Warner, a Labour Health Minister for more than three years under the previous Government understands that point. [Interruption.] I am disappointed that the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) laughs, because at the time she thought that he was a valued Minister in the Department of Health. That point about change is in his book—a thoroughly good book, by the way, which I suggest she reads if she has not already done so. He says that reform is essential, because failure cannot be allowed to carry on taking taxpayers’ money and providing a sub-standard service to the public.

Reforming an organisation the size of the NHS is a big challenge, but it is also a big opportunity. What we propose is not simply to tread water or to be satisfied with the NHS just scraping by; we want to see it improve for the benefit of patients in every way.

There is no reason why we have to put up with care that is anything less than world-class, and our plans revolve around that happening: cutting down inefficiency; empowering clinicians; giving them—

[Mr Alan Campbell (Tynemouth) (Lab)]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Main Question accordingly put.