NHS Reorganisation

Tom Blenkinsop Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend does a great job in ensuring that this Government are held to account on the NHS through the Health Committee. He rightly says that Monitor’s budget is currently about £20 million and the impact assessment calculates that that could increase to as much as nearly £140 million—although Monitor’s core operating costs are not that entire total, the figure will be at least three times as high as it is now. That is not a decrease in bureaucracy and operating costs, it is an increase. Hon. Members would do well to read some of the documents, rather than the briefings they have been given by their Front Benchers.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) has told us that Monitor’s budget will increase by the amount that he said, but does my right hon. Friend agree that it will continue to increase exponentially, because the Government are opening up the NHS to European competition law, and that competition will grow exponentially year on year?

[John Healey]

This is such a big and fundamental change to the NHS that £140 million is the best guess. Clearly, as the competition role of Monitor increases and the competition legislation it has to deal with becomes stronger, those costs could increase. We simply do not know, because this is a leap in the dark for the NHS.

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[Mr Lansley]

Yes. I am grateful to my hon. Friend and pay tribute to his work in this area, which is much respected. He is absolutely right—we will be doing that. Indeed, we can see the benefit already. A few weeks ago, I launched the bowel cancer awareness campaign in the east of England. The reason we were able to start that awareness campaign in that region is that we had good staging data arising out of the cancer networks in the area, which means that we will be able to make valid comparisons between the past and the future in terms of the stage at which patients are presenting for diagnosis of cancer.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

rose—

[Owen Smith]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

I serve on the Select Committee on Health with the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), which I enjoy doing. If I may say so, her speech was uncharacteristically partisan, but I guess that that is the nature of debate on the Floor of the House.

The motion moved by the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), the shadow Health Secretary, has a clear, simple message: “Frank was right.” For 20 years, every Health Secretary—starting with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and including me and my right hon. Friend the current Health Secretary—with the exception only of the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), has espoused the principles that underlie the Health and Social Care Bill.

The motion is an apologia from the Labour party to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras, for whom I feel rather sorry. He was roundly rubbished by his party in opposition, and now he is being canonised. As in the Roman Catholic Church, it is better that you are dead if you are to be a saint in the Labour party. I did not agree with him when he was in office, and nor do I agree with him now.

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, the truth is that the principles in the Bill are principles that every Labour Health Secretary, with the exception of the right hon. Gentleman, sought to carry out in office. Let us go through them. GP-led commissioning was one of the first principles that Labour espoused in 1997. My right hon. Friend rightly refers to practice-based commissioning, but that was actually the previous Government’s second attempt to introduce GP-led commissioning, which happened after the first attempt—primary care groups—had failed. The previous Government tried twice to apply the principle that they espoused; my right hon. Friend is trying once again.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The Bill gives primacy to Monitor, which makes economic decisions. It does not give primacy to quality under the Care Quality Commission. Primacy will go to Monitor, which will make economic decisions on what health treatment people receive.

[Mr Dorrell]

I understand the point, and it is part of the argument that the Labour party has started to make about how, since Christmas, it has suddenly discovered that the Health and Social Care Bill and the policy that it implements—a policy based on commissioners having choices in the interests of taxpayers and patients—require commissioners to have those very choices if the policy is to be effective. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, the principle of competition for commissioners’ budgets, as funded by the taxpayer, was set out by the last Government in their policy of December 2007. Hon. Members should look at the text—it is there in the record.

The last Government were right. The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne seeks to set up an Aunt Sally when he says that there is something wrong with European principles of competition law when applied to health care. Let us be clear: if we are spending £100 billion of taxpayers’ money on securing high-quality health care on the principle of equitable access, what is wrong with insisting on the principle that we should not allow monopolists to restrict the choices available for using that budget to deliver high-quality care for patients? That is the principle, and that is why I am in favour of competition law applying to the provision of health care in response to a tax-funded budget.