Hospital Finances

Debate between Simon Burns and Owen Smith

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) on securing the debate, albeit at an hour and on a day when there is a little competition for the attention of the House and perhaps of the media, too. Maybe the media are watching, but I have my doubts.

I will start on a note of agreement with the hon. Gentleman, and, I am sure, the Minister, on the need to make savings in the NHS. There was widespread agreement before and after the general election that the NHS needs to make significant savings of £15 billion or maybe £20 billion in the spending period, which is vital. Equally, the NHS needs to find ways to achieve those efficiencies to achieve productivities that will allow those savings to be sustained over a longer period. There is also widespread agreement that there is a massive challenge in achieving those savings, and addressing perennial problems that have persisted in the NHS under successive Administrations.

Some trusts, as the hon. Gentleman has said, are consistently in the red and have been for a while. They seem to have persistent and perhaps insurmountable problems with their finances. There has been an evolving but still too opaque process of dealing with that, with bail-outs or loans from the SHA or the PCT to trusts that have struggled. Despite the efforts of successive Governments, and particularly the previous Labour Government, there remains too much variability in the quality of service offered and prices paid across the NHS. I also agree with the hon. Gentleman that there have been persistent political obstacles in the way of achieving the reconfiguration of services, which we all recognise may be required to deliver some of the proposed savings.

Since the Government came to office more than a year ago, they have been right to try—rhetorically, at least—to address those issues and to spell out some of the challenges and potential solutions. First, we all agree that there needs to be greater transparency on accounting, on design decisions about services and, in particular, on reconfigurations of acute services. Secondly, there has been widespread agreement over a long period that clinicians need to take greater responsibility for redesigns and, as the Government would put it, to be at the heart of decision making in ways that force them to take account of issues and be responsible about engaging in the ongoing debate. Finally, there is agreement that we need a more effective means of dealing with failing trusts, so that we have a failure regime that allows whichever party is in government to reconfigure vital services in a way that protects them.

The Government want to do all those things, and they are right to want to do them, while increasing quality at the same time, but the problem is that their prescription for achieving them is entirely inappropriate. It is the wrong prescription for the NHS, and it will not achieve what the Government want; in fact, it will compound the problem. The past year has been a wasted year, in which many of the decisions that the Government say they want to take and that they want the NHS to take have been put off. The health service has had to deal with the chaos of having to wait and wonder what the future will hold for individuals and institutions across the NHS, as the Government’s shambolic Health and Social Care Bill passes slowly and tardily through the Commons.

The principal reason why the Government have introduced the Bill is that they still have an entirely misguided belief that competition in the NHS between providers will result in a more efficient allocation of resources, drive productivity and lead to innovation in the NHS, which is not the case. The planning that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned is vital in the NHS, and that is particularly true of planning that militates against injudicious decisions being taken by parts of the NHS that are more autonomous than they were previously.

Ultimately, the chaos we have seen over the past year has been worse than not allowing the NHS to take the necessary financial decisions and steps towards reconfiguration to achieve better financial outcomes. Worse still, it is compromising patient care. The quality agenda that the Government profess to support and pursue above all else, even in respect of competition, is not letting the NHS improve as quickly as it has done in the past. The Minister is looking quizzical, but I would point to the fact that the figures for 18-week waiting times, for four-hour waits at A and E and for the time people wait to receive vital diagnostic tests are all increasing.

[Mr Simon Burns]

indicated dissent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

Yes, they are. The Minister says they are not, and if he wants to intervene, I would love to hear what he has to say.

[Mr Burns]

I know that the hon. Gentleman does not want to misinterpret the facts, and even he will have to accept, if he looks at the facts, that the median waiting time remains stable. Even someone he loves to quote—Chris Ham of the King’s Fund—has acknowledged that in recent weeks.

[Owen Smith]

The King’s Fund explicitly said that, for the months from February through to March, numbers for the 18-week wait were at a three-year high. The Minister talks about median waiting times, but we need to talk about overall waiting times. He cannot disagree with the fact that the figures for the other waiting times that I have mentioned—the waiting times for diagnostic testing and for four-hour waits in A and E—are at their highest levels since their inception. That is where we are, and I fear that is where we will be for a long period unless the NHS is allowed to concentrate on clinical targets, which are crucial to the quality of service that patients receive, rather than having to worry about future configuration and structure.

How has the vital question of savings been dealt with over the past year? The hon. Member for Southport has discussed the need to save between £15 billion and £20 billion, and service reconfiguration is one way to do that. We do not know exactly how we are doing on savings right now, because the Government have not told us where we are or whether we are on track to realise those savings. We know that trusts are being asked to make savings of about 4% a year, but we do not know how many actually are. We fear that we are behind the curve in achieving that figure, which Monitor’s report of September last year suggests that 63% of trusts are failing to do. The King’s Fund tracker, which came out only last week, said that half the managers it surveyed feared that they would not hit the 4% target, and an even greater proportion feared they would not hit the 6% target that they are setting for themselves.

[Mr Burns]

Will the hon. Gentleman accept—I am sure that he knows this—that the King’s Fund work was only a snapshot? It surveyed only 29 finance directors out of 165, and 27 of them made the comments that he has described. However, the latest quarterly NHS performance statistics, which are an actual look at what is going on across the NHS rather than a snapshot, show that 20 of the 21 indicators are being reached. Of those, 14 show improvements, whether that is on bowel and breast cancer screening or on times for admission for minor strokes. That gives a more accurate assessment of what is going on.

[Owen Smith]

Of course, the baseline for those outcomes is relatively new, because this is a new set of indicators. More importantly, however, the Minister will accept that I was talking specifically about financial data and whether services will hit their financial targets. I acknowledge that the King’s Fund tracker is but a snapshot and that, as the Minister has said, it uses only 29 NHS trusts. However, the Monitor survey of September last year, which I have mentioned, related to all 100-odd foundation trusts, and it found that 63% of them are behind the curve in achieving the 4% target. It is not, therefore, inexplicable or out of the realms of possibility that the King’s Fund survey might be entirely accurate, even though it is a snapshot. Of course, the Minister can clear this up for us right now by saying precisely how many foundation and non-foundation trusts are on target to meet the 4% target for productivity savings this year. He can clear that up for us, and we will have no further questions about it. He could publish a tracker to keep things clear for us.

After quality and savings, the third issue that I want to discuss is transparency, because the Government have persistently said that more transparency in the system will allow decisions to be taken in a better way and to be scrutinised, as well as allowing an improvement in productivity and quality. Other Opposition Members and I have pursued this issue during the seemingly endless sittings on the Health and Social Care Bill. I have said repeatedly that the fog around this issue has not got any thinner; in fact, it was approaching pea-soup status towards the end of our sittings.

We have no real idea how the Government will address the apparent shortcomings in the 17—or is it 20 or 25?—trusts that are currently in trouble and do not have the requisite stability to achieve foundation trust status. We do not know exactly what the Government are doing to bring them up to foundation trust status. Nor do we know precisely what will happen if one of them goes bust. We do not know what the failure regime is—

[Mr Burns]

You will.

[Owen Smith]

Well, as we said in Committee, we wait with bated breath to hear what the failure regime will look like. It is a crucial piece of the jigsaw if the Government are to be trusted with the NHS and if we are to know precisely what regime they will put in place to protect services that, as we have heard across the country, are considered vital for communities.

We do not have any idea, really, how many of the existing foundation trusts are overspent, and therefore in breach of their authorisation. The Minister could inform us about that. He could be a little more transparent about precisely what the situation is. I mentioned this earlier, but the Minister could clear up persistent concerns, in particular on the Labour side of the House, that the Government think that private sector management might be a means to improve the productivity, efficiency and, indeed, perhaps even the clinical quality, of some of the failing trusts. I do not think that that fear is wholly misplaced. We simply need to listen to the words of Matthew Kershaw, who is employed in the Department of Health to oversee that very process, and who told a Health Service Journal conference just the other day—it was reported only a week ago—that it was perfectly possible that we might look at means by which private sector companies might come in to run, through franchise, some failing trusts.

[Mr Burns]

The hon. Gentleman really takes the biscuit. He raises the possibility of private sector companies providing a manager or managers where the management in an NHS hospital are failing to help pull it round and return it to stability. He conveniently forgets that there is only one instance, to the best of my knowledge, where that is happening in the NHS, and it is—possibly, provided it is all finalised—at Hinchingbrooke hospital in Huntingdon. That was set in progress not by a Conservative Government, but by his party’s Government, under the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), prior to the general election. To complain about something that his own party’s Health Secretary did is somewhat rich.

[Owen Smith]

The difference, of course, is that that is one instance in a system where there is still strategic management, planning and control, both at the centre and in the regions. The difference under the new dispensation, as envisaged in the Health and Social Care Bill, will be that we shall have a fundamentally disaggregated, fragmented NHS with more autonomy and with the ability for more trusts to choose what to do. That runs the risk that the Secretary of State will have far less control over those private providers, if they are running franchises.

[Mr Burns]

The hon. Gentleman can wriggle as much as he likes. The fact is that he has been holed below the waterline. A Labour Government set up the only example in the health service in England of what he said, specifically, it was unacceptable to do. He could at least have the decency to come clean and accept it, and, if he feels so strongly now, he could apologise.

[Owen Smith]

I am not sure that I am the most celebrated politician being asked to apologise today. I do not need to apologise and do not feel that I am holed below the Plimsoll line, because clearly a very different future scenario is being painted as a result of the changes that the Minister and the Government are pushing through in the Bill. Our grave concern is that the local populace, politicians, and, indeed, Parliament, will have far less control over and insight into what different parts of the NHS will be doing after they are afforded that much greater autonomy. Of course, there will also, ultimately, be a far greater ingress of private companies into the NHS at many levels.

[Owen Smith]

I would love to be undefeatable in argument, but I am not sure whether that is true. However, I will add one thing before I move on. I did not say—this is the principal reason why I do not need to apologise to the Minister—that the idea of a private company coming in and running an NHS service should never be countenanced. I suggested that in the world envisaged in the Health and Social Care Bill, where there will be a significant increase at many levels in the number of private sector providers in the NHS, there is an immediate local concern, in addition to the far more substantive problems of competition law becoming the norm for organising the NHS and, crucially, dismantling it. The local concern is that there will be less control over a greater proportion of the NHS, once we have more private providers. That clear concern is widely felt across the House and outside it.

The hon. Member for Southport touched on how NHS bureaucracy allows tough decisions to be taken. He talked about politicians not being prepared to take tough decisions, and about the NHS’s own clinicians, bureaucrats and managers being unable to do so. That needs to be recognised, because there are difficulties with an organisation as big, and arguably as unwieldy, as the NHS, with so many different moving parts and so many different agendas in play. However, as to the labyrinthine bureaucracy that the Health and Social Care Bill will create, with the welter of new organisations—the national commissioning board at national and local levels, consortia, senates, clinical networks in addition to the ones that we currently have, health and wellbeing boards, HealthWatch, the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission—it is beyond this simple politician to see how that much more complex architecture will facilitate easier decision making in the NHS about tough reconfigurations. I just cannot see how it will get easier with far more complex architecture.

I thought that the hon. Member for Southport talked interestingly about how, at a more aggregate level, one might imagine better ways to manage what he called the “dormant surplus estate” of the NHS, which is an interesting point. There are ways in which dormant bits of hospitals and dormant land could be better managed. I have grave concerns about the world that I envisage will pertain in several years, if the Bill unfortunately passes, in which different parts of the NHS will have much greater autonomy in making those decisions, and there will be a much greater risk that the motivation behind them will be financial as opposed to clinical. I find it impossible to believe that the likelihood of aggregated strategic decision making in respect of that estate will be improved by allowing the NHS to break up, as I fear it will. The National Audit Office report that the hon. Gentleman prayed in aid was not on precisely that territory, but it pointed to a risk that always attends autonomy—that it results in less strategic decision making, because decisions are made at a more micro level. That risk clearly attended foundation trusts, and it will get worse, not better, under the Bill.

Lastly, the Minister has talked about clinicians sitting at the heart of the decision-making process. Again, I use the analogy of a labyrinth in the NHS; I cannot see how in that new labyrinth clinicians will be at the heart of decision making. It is a labyrinth that would challenge Theseus, let alone the NHS. Those clinicians will be in the maze with many bureaucrats, some of them perhaps rebadged and shifted from primary care trusts and strategic health authorities into consortia, the NCB or the NCB’s regional arms, and some perhaps from BUPA, Assura Medical or one of the other bodies that will no doubt help to manage commissioning for consortia, and, potentially, for acute care.

In reality, the previous Government funded the NHS from a point where it was on its knees. They tripled the funding of the NHS, radically increased capital spending and raised some of the issues that the hon. Member for Southport has mentioned about the private finance initiative—we could have a long debate about that and how we should reconsider some of those capital projects.

[Mr Burns]

The hon. Gentleman just said that the previous Government tripled funding on the NHS. Will he share with the Chamber how much NHS funding was in financial year 1996-97?

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

My recollection is that in 1996-97 NHS funding was around £39 billion, and it has now gone up to around £111 billion.

[Mr Burns]

How is that triple?

[Owen Smith]

Well, it is not far off. With the greatest respect, funding pretty much tripled—the figure might be £10 billion short, but it is pretty close.

[Mr Burns]

That is a lot of money.

[Owen Smith]

Okay, let us call it 2.8 times, as opposed to three times, but the increase was rather large. It was certainly reflective of the enormous need when the Labour Government came to power in 1997, following the chronic underfunding of the NHS presided over by the Government in which the right hon. Gentleman was a Minister. Some of the capital spending and its mechanisms, as I have said, need to be opened up and debated, so transparency ought to be a good thing in that case. That capital investment was undoubtedly required, because we needed new hospitals and investment, which were not provided by the previous Tory Government and which the Labour Government delivered.

In the latter years of the Labour Government, after the 2006 White Paper and, crucially, Lord Ara Darzi and his review, we started to look carefully and in a structured fashion, given the difficult nature of the task in hand, at how clinician-led reconfiguration of the NHS could come about and, notably, at greater integration between primary and secondary care and at delivering more of the services traditionally delivered in secondary and tertiary care in the primary care setting. That was the legacy that we left this Government, who have, with respect, blown it. They have wasted the past year, instead of moving on with that positive heritage. They have shifted into their misguided belief that competition in the health service, as for utilities, white goods or whatever other analogy they want to use, will drive more efficient decision making, innovation and better productivity. The Minister is wrong about that, and that will not happen. I am absolutely certain that that is the case.

In pursuing the illusion of competition, the Minister is running two risks in the reconfiguration and financial agenda that we are debating today. First, the increased short-term risk is of ill-considered cuts and reconfigurations in the NHS as a result of managers with their eye only half on the ball, and, as Sir David Nicholson has conceded, half their time spent wondering and worrying about their personal and professional future. There is a real risk that short-term decisions are being taken in that worrying, troubling atmosphere.

In the longer term, the far more profound risk is that the sort of competition that the Minister believes will drive greater efficiency and the disaggregation of the NHS will result in an NHS that delivers worse, more fragmented care, with more variability in the price paid for care, which is a licence for a postcode lottery. My grave concern is that the Government are prepared to countenance such a future and prepared to take such risks with the NHS.

--- Later in debate ---

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

May I also say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Betts?

I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) on securing the debate and on his particularly interesting and thoughtful speech. I have some sympathy with him, but he is right: sadly, events elsewhere on the parliamentary estate are securing more attention. However, I hope to reassure him by saying that this debate had quality rather than quantity.

It is a particular pleasure to have the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) with us. We have got used to him, while in Committee on the Health and Social Care Bill, and he is beginning to invent—or rather, reinvent—himself as some sort of cheeky chappie, who talks the talk that is fed to him by his party elders. One has to admire him because, more or less, most of the time, he manages to stop that smile completely breaking out on his lips—he clearly does not believe a lot of what he is telling us, because it flies in the face of reality. If one needed an example taken to its typical extreme, it would have been his accusations about private managers helping to secure and turn around any NHS hospital, because the only example will probably be Hinchingbrooke, which was of course set on its way by the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). We have to admire the hon. Member for Pontypridd for bringing up an example as fraught with danger for him as that.

The subject of the debate is interesting and, as the hon. Member for Southport said on a number of occasions, difficult in many ways. Before engaging in it, however, I pay tribute to those doctors, nurses, ancillary staff and others who work day in, day out in hospitals up and down the country doing a fantastic job for patients. All too often, because the quality of their care for patients is seamless, it goes unnoticed, which is a reflection of the high standards that they set for themselves in providing that care.

We believe that we must have a sustainable national health service in this country—one that can evolve with the times and changing situations, whether medical or financial. The report this week from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility has underlined the importance of the Government’s commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability for the NHS. It also demonstrates the critical importance of responding to our ageing population. Consequently, health funding will need to rise in the coming years, and the Government are totally committed to its doing just that.

As hon. Members know, we gave a commitment in our election manifesto to provide a real-terms increase in funding in every year of the Parliament while we are in government—the lifetime of this Parliament. We have honoured that, and we will continue to do so in subsequent years. The only trouble is that because of the horrendous economic situation that we inherited from the last Government, the available money is far more restricted, because we must take some extremely tough decisions to sort out the mess that was left to us. That has meant that the real-terms increase in NHS funding has been modest, albeit a real-terms increase, and has presented a challenge to the NHS, as the hon. Members for Pontypridd and for Southport said.

[Owen Smith]

Will the Minister say how much less that amount of money will be as a result of the pause and listen exercise, and the increased cost resulting from the Health and Social Care Bill?

[Mr Burns]

The answer is no. It is not, “No, I will not give an answer”; it is no to the fundamental question. The hon. Gentleman is aware from previous discussions that the cost of the listening process and the Future Forum was modest, and the impact assessment for the Bill, which he studied, will be updated, as he well knows, when the Bill leaves this House and goes to another place. The current impact assessment shows that the one-off cost of the modernisation and improvement of the NHS is about £1.4 billion. By the end of this Parliament, the savings generated by that modernisation process and the changes will be about £5 billion, and £1.7 billion a year thereafter until the end of the decade, of which every penny will be reinvested in front-line services. There will be a subsequent impact assessment, probably in about six or seven weeks, subject to progress in this House, and if there are any changes or updating we will see them in that impact assessment, and there will be an updated figure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

I look forward to it.

[Mr Burns]

The hon. Gentleman says he looks forward to it. Let us hope that he does when he sees the figures, because in my experience he rarely looks forward to anything that flies in the face of his arguments or is not helpful to his arguments, because he finds that disappointing. I hope that he will be disappointed when the new impact assessment comes out.

To return to my original point, the increase in real terms that we will make in every year of this Parliament will mean a £12.5 billion increase in funding for the health service over the lifetime of this Parliament.

The report from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility emphasises the importance of constantly increasing productivity within the NHS and other public services. As the hon. Gentleman knows, in every year of the last Government there was a fall of between 0.2% and 0.4% in productivity in the NHS, which is unacceptable, and ultimately would become unsustainable because we need to generate growth and productivity to drive improvements in patient care, outcomes and the overall performance of the NHS in providing patient care.

As the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Southport said, we embraced and accepted the quality, innovation, productivity and prevention agenda challenge set out by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), which involved savings of £20 billion over three years originally, but we have extended it to four years. By cutting out inefficiencies, and enhancing and improving best practice that can be shared within the NHS, we can make savings that can be ploughed back into patient care.

The extra £12.5 billion to finance the increase in the health service over the next few years will not alone be enough to meet the rising demand for health care and its increasing costs. We need to find savings of up to £20 billion during the lifetime of this Parliament that we can reinvest, and that is the crucial challenge facing the national health service. I am confident that it will meet that challenge over the next three to four years.

The overall strategic health authority and primary care trust surplus of £1.375 billion during the last financial year will act as a sound financial platform for the NHS. Every penny of that surplus should be used to help to improve health outcomes for patients, and to meet the challenges and demands as we move to the new, modernised NHS, subject to approval in this House and another place. The challenge for every NHS organisation is to improve the quality of care that it offers while ensuring that money spent on care is spent effectively and efficiently, because that is what matters to patients and to the public.

The hon. Member for Southport referred to the crucial move to community-based services, which is already happening, and will continue to happen where it is clinically appropriate. The hon. Gentleman spoke about the impact on hospitals of reducing hospital-based activities and delivering more services in the community. That is a crucial area, and a valid issue to raise. As I said, where it is clinically appropriately and when it can lead to demonstrable improvements in patient outcomes, more services should be provided in the community—for example, in GP practices or even in the home. All of us as constituency MPs and those of us with a particular interest in the NHS and health care know of examples and more and more practices where home and community settings are being used to meet the demands and needs of local populations, because the vast majority of people in this country would prefer, when it is clinically appropriate and feasible, to be treated in the community in their own homes instead of having to go to a perhaps inappropriate hospital setting for treatment. The QIPP long-term conditions workstream seeks to ensure that patients can be cared for effectively in their home or community, avoiding unplanned, unnecessary and expensive admissions. That is better for the patient, better for the NHS and better for taxpayers. It is also an opportunity for hospitals.

Increasingly, the best hospitals think of themselves no longer as just a physical place of bricks and mortar, but as providers of excellent health care. For example, Croydon Health Services NHS Trust provides both hospital and community services through a number of community and specialist clinics throughout the area. It is effectively becoming a health care trust instead of simply a hospital trust. That is the way for the future.

A considerable amount of the debate was spent on reconfiguration, and I would like briefly to address that. As society and medicine change, so must the NHS. The hon. Gentlemen said that tough decisions will have to be taken, and that people will have to be brave, honest and realistic in addressing the issues. I totally agree.

The NHS has always been responsive, whether to patients’ expectations or improving technologies. As lifestyles, society and medicine continue to change and evolve, the NHS must also change to meet those challenges. As technology and clinical practice get better and better, some services that were previously provided only in acute hospitals can now be safely provided in other places. A local health centre, a GP surgery or even the patient’s own home may, when appropriate, be the setting for health care and treatment that were previously not possible or feasible in such places. That shows how our health care is constantly evolving and improving.

[Owen Smith]

I hope the Minister will forgive me as I have asked this sort of question many times. Does he feel that in the world envisaged by the Health and Social Care Bill, where there is more competition between different providers in local health economies, it will be more difficult rather than easier for the sort of integration he speaks of to come about?

[Mr Burns]

In the light of the hon. Gentleman’s question, I will preface my reply by the words, “If he will forgive me.” We have had these conversations frequently—to be polite—during the course of the 42 sittings of the Health and Social Care Bill, and I fundamentally disagree with him. As we modernise the NHS, we are seeking through the Bill to put the patient at the centre of their experience, so that they are totally involved in their treatment and needs, are talked with rather than talked to, and can be part of the decision-making processes by which we are driving up the quality of patient care and improving outcomes. We will ensure those things through a comprehensive national health service, greater integration and far greater collaboration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

rose—

[Mr Burns]

There is no point in my giving way to the hon. Gentleman; I have only 10 minutes left and whatever I say he will not accept publicly because it runs contrary to the mantra that he and his hon. Friends constantly spout as they seek to undermine the procedures that will ensure a first-class national health service to meet the demands of our citizens.

Returning to my original point, at the same time as one will see different settings for appropriate care, other services that need highly specialist care will be centralised at larger, regional centres of excellence where there is clear evidence of improved health outcomes. Reconfiguration is about modernising treatment and improving facilities to ensure that patients get the best treatment as close to home as possible, thereby both saving and improving lives. That is an essential part of a modernised NHS, but it should not be enforced from above.

There will be no more impositions of the kind that saw a GP-led health centre in every PCT, whether it was wanted or not. Instead, the reconfiguration of services will be locally driven, clinically led and will have public support. It will be change from the bottom up, not the top down. The reconfiguration of services should—and will—be a matter for the local NHS. There is no national blueprint for how health care should be organised locally, and services need to be tailored to meet the specific needs of the local population. Effective local engagement will ensure that services continually improve, based on feedback from local communities. In an NHS that is built around the patient, changes to services must begin and end with what patients and local communities need. Last May, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State introduced four tests, and current and future reconfigurations must be along the lines of the four basic premises in those tests. Local plans must demonstrate: support from local GPs; strengthened public and patient engagement; a clear clinical evidence base; and support for patient choice. The tests make sure that any changes to health services will be true to the spirit of “No decision about me, without me.”

The hon. Member for Southport also raised the important issue of the private finance initiative. We have seen evidence from around the country of significant problems in a number of hospitals as a result of decisions taken by the previous Government to approve what were sometimes extremely expensive PFI schemes that became a drain on a trust’s annual income. As the Government confirmed at the end of last year, where PFI schemes can clearly be shown to represent good value for money, we remain committed to public-private partnerships, including those delivered by PFI, and they will play an important role in delivering future NHS infrastructure. We also believe, however, that there have been too many PFI schemes, and that some were too ambitious in scope. In addition, we have also had serious concerns about the value for money of some PFI contracts signed in the past.

The Treasury has reviewed value for money guidance for new schemes, and looked at how operational schemes can be run more efficiently. In January, the Treasury published new draft guidance, “Making savings in operational PFI contracts”, which will help Departments and local authorities to identify opportunities to reduce the cost of operational PFI contracts. As part of that savings initiative, my noble Friend Lord Sassoon, Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, launched four pilot projects to test the ideas in the Treasury’s draft guidance. One of those pilots was a hospital PFI scheme at Queen’s Hospital in Romford. The focus of the Romford pilot was to find efficiency gains and savings within the PFI contract, allowing the quality of care for patients to remain the top priority. Earlier today, Lord Sassoon announced the results of three of the four pilots, including that at Romford hospital. The Romford pilot showed that savings of 5% could be made to the revenue cost of the PFI scheme.

I welcome the Treasury’s findings, but we have yet to consider them in detail. I understand that the Treasury has now placed updated value for money guidance on its website. I hope that that will help trusts with operational PFI schemes, and trusts that are planning PFI schemes, to make significant savings. Every penny of those savings will be retained by the trust to be reinvested in improving patient care.

[Owen Smith]

rose—

[Mr Burns]

I will briefly give way for the last time.

[Owen Smith]

I have a basic factual question for the Minister. Will the results of that survey lead to an attempt to reopen or renegotiate any of those contracts?

[Mr Burns]

As I said to the hon. Gentleman a few moments ago, the pilot schemes and investigation published by my noble Friend Lord Sassoon show that there is potential within existing PFI schemes to make some savings—I cited the figure of up to 5%. We are going to study that report. It was published earlier today and we need time to look at it and see how those savings can be realised within the context of the existing PFI scheme, rather than by reopening it and starting again.

In conclusion, there are many challenges to the NHS, but those concerning finances will be assisted and helped by our commitment to a real-terms increase in funding. The hon. Member for Southport said that the reconfiguration programme must be driven by local demand and needs, and I agree with him. He raised the issue of access to facilities being part of those considerations, and it may console him that I am able to assure him that access will form part of any consideration. Local people will determine where their local services should be placed and, together with a number of other factors, the issue of access should be considered. Such decisions must be determined by what the local community needs and what meets its requirements in the provision of health care. In many ways, such decisions will be determined with the same checks and balances, and with the involvement under a modernised NHS of health and wellbeing boards, and in certain circumstances, the national commissioning board. Overview and scrutiny committees will have the opportunity to refer plans to the Secretary of State.

As the NHS is modernised, the changes outlined by the Secretary of State will begin to take effect and give clinicians and the local NHS greater control over decision-making processes, rather than having politicians micro-managing on a day-to-day basis from Richmond House. That will provide a future for the NHS that can meet the requirements of enhancing and improving patient care and, most importantly, improving outcomes for patients.