Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support the amendment. My attitude may be coloured by my personal experience, but I look back to the time when Mrs Castle, later Baroness Castle, attempted to remove all private beds from all National Health Service hospitals. I was a whole-time NHS consultant with a personal chair and I had a major research unit studying neuromuscular diseases in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In that city there were three major hospitals, each of which had one private bed. The result, to my great regret, was that I could not admit to hospital patients who were referred to me from other countries—patients from Australia, and even two from the United States—to take advantage of my unit’s facilities for research and investigation. There were no private beds to which I could admit them and no private hospital in that city had anything like the facilities necessary for that particular purpose. This cap was based on private income in hospitals in 2003, but the world has moved on since then. Particularly within our foundation hospitals, but also within our university departments, there are professorial units with innovative procedures and treatments that are being rapidly developed and could prove to be not only extremely important for patients—after all, let us not forget the large number of patients in the UK who are insured for private medical care—but also a very attractive possibility for patients coming to this country from overseas who must by law be private patients if they are admitted to hospitals in the National Health Service. The present cap is proving to be outdated, illogical and detrimental to processes which could benefit the NHS by bringing in substantial additional finance to support its work. The amendment is cleverly phrased to indicate that: ""The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for exceptions"." It rests with the Secretary of State, ""subject to the principle that any such exception must in all the circumstances be in the interests of the National Health Service"." That is a very satisfactory way to frame the amendment and I support it strongly.