Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, this is a Bill of profound importance for the quality and delivery of health and care in England, for patients and for all those who care for them. As such it has been, quite rightly, the subject of intense scrutiny, not only in another place, but also more widely. Indeed, the intensity of the spotlight directed at its content over the last few months is borne out by the number of your Lordships who wish to speak today and tomorrow. I look forward to the debate ahead of us. In approaching this Bill, I believe it is instructive to look backwards to its roots as well as forward to what it seeks to achieve. In opposition, the two coalition parties asked themselves the same simple question: ““How can we make the NHS better?””. In asking that question we were clear about several things. We were clear that the founding principles of the NHS—that it should be a comprehensive service, free at the point of use, regardless of ability to pay, and funded from general taxation—should remain sacrosanct. We were also clear that we should reject any system that discriminated between rich and poor. The NHS should aspire to the highest standards of service for all our citizens, but in seeking ways to make the health service better, it was necessary to identify the challenges that it faces. What are they? The first, and most obvious, is rising demand for healthcare from a growing and ageing population and the increase in long-term conditions. The second is the rising expectations of patients about what should be on offer to them from a health service in the 21st century, including new drugs and technologies. The third is the financial challenge—the inexorably rising costs of providing services against an increasingly constrained budget. Two key principles emerge from this analysis: the need for maximum efficiency in the way the health budget is spent; and the need to make the service patient-centred. For many years, politicians have spoken of the NHS as a patient-centred service, but how can a service be truly patient-centred if decisions about the treatments and pathways of care that are available to patients are taken at several removes from those who know best what the needs of patients are—namely, the patients themselves and the healthcare professionals who look after them? How can a health service be patient-centred if the measures of its performance overlook what for patients matters most, namely the outcomes that it achieves and the quality of care that patients receive? What of NHS efficiency, when so much of its budget is consumed by layers of administration, when its productivity over the last few years has fallen, and when patients experience poor handovers between different parts of the NHS and between the NHS and social care? There is a fundamental problem, too, in NHS accountability. The original National Health Service Act 1946 provided for a comprehensive health service, but it did so by employing a simple legal precept—that responsibility for everything that happened in the NHS should lie with the Secretary of State. That may have held good in the 1940s, when the challenges facing the NHS were largely the management of acute short-term conditions, but it does not hold good now. The Secretary of State has for decades delegated his functions for the commissioning and provision of healthcare services to other bodies. The reason for that is simple: managing the range of healthcare needs for our diverse population is now so complex that no one would argue that it is a task best carried out from Whitehall. This has resulted in a vacuum in NHS accountability, with no measures or mechanisms whereby PCTs and trusts can be held locally to account. We in Parliament can only turn to the Secretary of State: he in turn can only give one answer—PCTs and trusts are autonomous organisations, their decisions are taken independently, in accordance with local priorities, and it is not appropriate for these decisions to be subject to interference from the centre. So the fact that the Secretary of State is responsible for making sure that there is an NHS available to all clashes with the fiction—for that is what it is—that he is somehow responsible for all clinical decision-making in the NHS. This results in a poor deal for the person at the centre of things—the patient. During the last few years, it became clear to politicians of all persuasions that there was another nettle that the NHS had to grasp: the need to improve quality. We know that, measured against accepted benchmarks, the outcomes experienced in the NHS sometimes fail to match up to those achieved in comparable countries. The OECD has reported that if the NHS were to perform as well as the best performing health systems, we could increase life expectancy in the UK by three years. Towards the end of the previous Government, the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, sounded a clarion call to managers and clinicians around the quality imperative. The focus of the noble Lord’s work—to define what quality means and to drive forward that agenda by fostering innovation, transparency, and choice, by strengthening regulation and by encapsulating the rights and legitimate expectations of patients and staff in an NHS constitution—was unarguably right. But his time in office was short. There was much more that still needed doing. Our plans for the NHS therefore focused on three main themes: accountability, efficiency and quality—keeping at the centre the most important theme of all, the interests of patients. Modernisation of the health service, we were clear, had to involve a fundamental shift in the balance of power, away from politicians and on to patients themselves through increased choice and information, and on to doctors and health professionals, giving them real budgets and empowering them to use those resources in a cost-effective way to drive up quality. That shift would have two advantages: it would serve to depoliticise the NHS; and it would promote efficiency and quality by making those who take clinical decisions on behalf of their patients responsible for the financial consequences of those decisions. Both GP fundholding in the 1990s and, more recently, practice-based commissioning showed that empowering clinicians directly could improve the quality of care that patients experience. The potential is truly enormous: allowing doctors, nurses, hospital specialists, social services and other professionals the freedom to design care pathways that are integrated, and to commission them on behalf of their patients, will, we firmly believe, transform the quality of care and treatment that the service delivers. At the same time, the clinicians on whom this greater autonomy is bestowed should be held accountable as never before—not only for their use of public money but also for the outcomes they achieve for patients. Unlike the largely illusory accountability of the present system, we were clear that doctors should be held to account in a transparent way by the patients and the communities whom they serve. Success and failure have to be measured in better and more meaningful ways, by reference to outcomes, not processes. For their part, elected politicians should be held accountable in a dual fashion: first, to Parliament, for the performance of the health service as a whole, defined principally in terms of outcomes; and, in parallel, for directly overseeing and delivering the public health agenda so critical for the long-term health of the nation—an agenda which, too often, has tended to assume a lower priority for government at times when the NHS budget has come under strain. The fruits of this deliberation were laid out in various Conservative and Liberal Democrat publications from 2006 onwards, including a White Paper, in our manifestos at the last election, the coalition agreement and, finally, a government White Paper from which this Bill directly stems. The democratic mandate for our proposals is absolutely clear. This brings me to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Rea. It is important that we remember what the Labour Party manifesto said on health at the last election: "““We will continue to press ahead with bold NHS reforms. All hospitals will become Foundation Trusts … Failing hospitals will have their management replaced. We will support an active role for the independent sector working alongside the NHS in the provision of care … Patient power will be increased””." Even Labour accepted at the last election that doing nothing is not an option for the NHS. Many of the principles in this Bill were ones that they wholeheartedly embraced. But the nature of the change must be different. Instead of putting in tiers of management and controlling everything from the centre, we are removing bureaucratic structures so that the front line is empowered as never before to deliver better patient care. This Bill achieves that by means of a better framework which allows power to be devolved from the centre so that innovation is unleashed—