Health (CSR)

Debate between Virendra Sharma and Kevin Barron

Thursday 11th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

It is good to be here this afternoon under your chairmanship, Mr Gale.

First, let me congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) on having the foresight to table this subject for debate. The Minister and the rest of those present will be pleased to know that I shall not be quoting from the King’s Fund during this debate—yes, I see that he is quite pleased about that. Instead, I have a brief from the Nuffield Trust about the likely effect of the comprehensive spending review on health, on top of what we have just been discussing. My hon. Friend talked about a 0.5% increase over four years, or something like that, but the Nuffield Trust argues at one level that there might be a bit more to it. Let me go into the brief it published last month, although it is not related to this particular debate:

“The 2010 Spending Review announced that the NHS will receive 0.4 per cent… growth over the next four years—0.1 per cent a year. This compares to an average real-terms increase of 5.7 per cent per year from 1997/98 to 2009/10. This is the lowest four years’ increase for the NHS since 1951-56. The Spending Review also allocates £1 billion a year from NHS funding to social care. The real-terms change in NHS funding, net of the social care support, is therefore a reduction of 0.5 per cent over the next four years.”

[Interruption.] The Minister says that that is rubbish. Perhaps he can stand up and tell us whether he disagrees with it. I want to continue with this brief and ask him about something that is directly related to this. The next paragraph states:

“The Spending Review also announced important changes to the treatment of past underspends.”

Many of us will know from talking to the NHS locally over the past few years that, because of the generous funding over the past decade, there are such things as underspends. The brief continues:

“Health has accumulated underspends of £5.5 billion, of which £3.7 billion is classified as ‘resource’ (ongoing expenditure on staff, medicines, equipment and the like) and £1.8 billion as capital. There is also a planned underspend for 2010/11 of £1 billion. According to the Spending Review, these accumulated stocks—known as end-year flexibility (EYF)—have been abolished. This means that any previous underspend that is honoured by the Department of Health will have to be made within the settlement outlined in the Spending Review.”

Will the Minister tell us whether the current underspends that our primary care trusts, or perhaps hospitals, hold at the moment—I hope they will be spent on expanding services, as they have been over the past decade—will be clawed out?

The other issue that I would like to raise relates to the changes in commissioning. I am in a peculiar position on this. Some Members will know that I chaired the Health Committee in the previous Parliament. In March, we brought out a report on commissioning. The Government responded some time in July. When the Secretary of State was on the Floor of the House making his statement on the White Paper, he talked about the Health Committee and said:

“Before the election, when it had a majority of Labour Members, the Select Committee on Health said that PCT commissioning was weak and that it was not delivering what was intended. He set up a programme called world class commissioning—it never worked.”

He was replying to the then shadow Secretary of State for Health. The Secretary of State went on:

“Central to delivering better commissioning in the health service is ensuring that those people who incur the expenditure—the general practitioners, on behalf of their patients—and who decide about the referral of patients are the same people who”

blah, blah, blah, blah. In reply to a comment from the current Chair of the Health Committee, the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell), the Secretary of State said:

“In his capacity as Chair of the Select Committee on Health, we will be responding to him very shortly regarding the Select Committee’s report from before the election on commissioning... What he has just said is absolutely right; we have been able—this is a central task in commissioning—to bring together the responsibility for management of patient care with the responsibility for the commissioning of services.”—[Official Report, 12 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 665-66.]

I have mentioned that because he has used my name on at least two occasions on the Floor of the House, basically to say that the report on commissioning that we published supports GP commissioning. I want to put it on record that, in my view—it was obviously my draft report and it was not challenged at the time—it does not support GP commissioning in the way that the Government are bringing forward the changes in commissioning.

We looked at four areas in that report, in relation to commissioning: whether to abolish PCTs and reintroduce health authorities; retain PCTs but introduce more integrated care; retain PCTs but introduce local clinical partnerships, under which GPs would directly control commissioning; and retain PCTs but commission services from hospitals. There was also the option to retain and strengthen PCTs. We did not come to a hard conclusion on any of that. I will not bore this gathering with the conclusions we did come to, but it is a gross misrepresentation to say that we were arguing for GP commissioning.

Maybe the nearest scenario that we looked at was the one in relation to local clinical partnerships. The Nuffield Trust informed us:

“There are key changes to the policy environment that are required if commissioning is to stand a chance of becoming effective.”

That was one option, but local clinical partnerships, as we quoted in the report, look very much like the system of GP fund-holding, which had failed to improve commissioning, in our view and that of many other people. We also said that it might be expected to have the advantages and disadvantages of that system.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is talking about the GP’s role. Does he agree that GPs are not trained for many of the roles asked of them, and not qualified to play those roles? There are no extra resources made available in order to gain the skills.

[Mr Barron]

That is absolutely true. There are fewer resources, because more is being taken out of administration than was planned before the spending review came along.

I am intrigued by the idea of giving clinicians power or giving GPs power. The British Medical Association is not saying no to the idea of GP commissioning. That is good—I have some quotations from it in front of me—but it would want to look at having a real local clinical partnership that included clinicians who worked in the local provider—the local hospitals. It believes that if we are going to do this, that ought to be looked at. I am interested to see whether the Minister agrees. One reason I say that is because, when we took evidence from his favourite organisation, the King’s Fund, the Royal College of Physicians and others thought that PCTs should be retained, but that hospital clinicians and GPs should work more closely together. Professor Ham, who is obviously one of the Minister’s favourite authors in these matters, said:

“There should be progressive migration towards clinically integrated systems, building on the most promising aspects of current reforms and drawing on evidence that shows the benefits of integration and the challenges of making a commissioner/provider split system function effectively.”

He was arguing for real integrated care, but my understanding is that that is not what the White Paper is proposing. It is proposing that only GPs will have the power to spend 70 or 80% of the NHS budget, not other local clinicians as well. I would like the Minister to reply on that specific point.