Two NHS stories were leading the news this morning, both of which are relevant to the subject of this debate. The hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) have talked about the important issue of whistleblowers. I want to talk about the other subject, which is the conflicted interests of clinical commissioning group members.
All hon. Members should be grateful for the British Medical Journal report that was the basis of this morning’s new stories. In case anyone has not seen it, let me read the headline points. It states:
“More than a third of GPs on the boards of the new clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England have a conflict of interest resulting from directorships or shares held in private companies”.
It continues:
“conflicts of interest are rife on CCG governing bodies, with 426 (36%) of the 1179 GPs in executive positions having a financial interest in a for-profit private provider beyond their own general practice—a provider from which their CCG could potentially commission services.
The interests range from senior directorships in local for-profit firms set up to provide services such as diagnostics, minor surgery, out of hours GP services, and pharmacy to shareholdings in large private sector health firms that provide care in conjunction with local doctors, such as Harmoni and Circle Health.
In some cases most of the GPs on the CCG governing body have financial interests in the same private healthcare provider.”
Yet the cheerleader for the privatisation, Dr Michael Dixon of NHS Alliance says:
“The priority is to move services out of hospital and into primary care. The reason this hasn’t happened to date is because of blocks in the system. It’s more important to remove those blocks than be preoccupied with conflicts of interest.”
I say that the British Medical Journal has done a good job, but it has only just scratched the surface. I shall refer to my own experience of trying to get to the bottom of this matter in north-west London.
On 10 November an article by the social affairs editor of The Guardian began:
“Five family doctors have this week become millionaires from the sale of their NHS-funded firm to one of the country’s biggest private healthcare companies in a deal that reveals how physicians can potentially profit from government policy in the new NHS.”
It went through the individual shareholdings of those doctors who had sold out to Care UK and it continued:
“Another winner seems to be NHS reform champion Ian Goodman. The north-west London GP chairs the Hillingdon clinical commissioning group and was also a board director of Harmoni. He could make as much as £2.6 million.”