Primary Care Trusts

The Health Committee report on changes to primary care trusts was extremely timely. It was published on 15 December 2005, a day after the start of a formal consultation. We were thus able to alert Ministers to how badly the pre-consultation phase had gone. The evidence that we took suggested that it was insufficient and flawed and that the time scale was too short. That was compounded by its inopportune timing at the beginning of the summer holidays. The Health Committee told Ministers that the consultation had been a top-down process. I feared the worst—that local needs would be overruled after a sham consultation. We called for the rest of the consultation process to be made much more transparent and to offer local people a genuine choice about how local health services could most effectively be restructured. In my constituency, the Shropshire and Staffordshire strategic health authority was determined to force through its plan for a huge, remote primary care trust, which would gobble up six other PCTs for the whole of Staffordshire. The SHA colluded with Staffordshire county council to ignore the wishes of local people, including a 300-strong public meeting at Leek in my constituency, where a unanimous vote was taken in favour of a more local primary care trust. I am glad to say that Ministers forced the strategic health authority to consult on a local PCT that would combine just two PCTs—the option that local people really wanted. When the SHA completely ignored the overwhelming local support of clinicians, the voluntary sector, patients and councils for that local option Ministers again overruled them. Their undemocratic and perverse decision was completely rejected. That happened not just in Staffordshire but all over the country. When the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), gave his statement on reconfiguration to the House on 16 May I was surprised to hear so many hon. Members from both sides of the House thank him. He was of course a new Minister but was speaking on behalf of the Secretary of State, who was unavoidably absent. Nearly every hon. Member who spoke congratulated Ministers on listening and acting on what local people had said.