House of Lords
Tuesday, 13 December 2011.
Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Oxford.
Health and Social Care Bill
Committee (12th Day)
Relevant documents: 19th report from the Delegated Powers Committee, 18th report from the Constitution Committee.
Clause 58 : Monitor
Amendment 260EA
Moved by
260EA: Clause 58, page 87, line 9, at end insert—
“(c) is to continue as regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts as set out in Chapter 5 of Part 2 of the National Health Service Act 2006”
My Lords, at last we move to Part 3. I hope the House will tolerate a longer speech from me than I normally make. I have made just a series of very short speeches so far on the Bill. There are many amendments in this part in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham. I would like to take this opportunity to explain the rationale behind the suite of amendments that we have put before the Committee today. I thought the Committee might prefer one longish speech rather than 10 short ones, which will almost certainly save time.
Our amendments are largely in this group, which addresses the role and powers of Monitor, and the next two groups, which address Monitor as a licensing body and its accountability. Later today, in groups eight and nine, there are the issues of pricing and the failure regime.
On these Benches, we decided some time ago that this was the heart of the Bill. Over all the debates we have had in the last 11 days, it has become abundantly clear that the reason we have this mammoth Bill, bringing about the expensive and risky reorganisation of our NHS, is to create a regulated market in the NHS. On these Benches, we have always believed that fundamentally, this Bill was conceived and constructed, around Part 3. Even after the pause for reflection and the report from the Future Forum, that remains the case.
Version 1 of the Bill was at least honest in being the embodiment of what Andrew Lansley had promised to do to our NHS back in 2005. He is at one with his colleagues Oliver Letwin and George Osborne. Mr Lansley wants markets and is against a communally owned and publicly run public sector. Like his Conservative colleagues, he believes that competition solves every problem and is a cure-all. Indeed, Mr Lansley’s background in establishing regulated utilities in his five-year preparation as the shadow Health Secretary makes it clear that he wants to treat our healthcare just the same as gas, water and electricity. That was version 1.
That finally collapsed when people including the Liberal Democrats actually read and understood the White Paper and the Bill. I will not trouble your Lordships’ House by picking over the corpses of versions 2 and 3 of the Bill, but we now have version 4, and I suspect that we are still far from finished. This Bill is a mess. It is now a catalogue of compromises, except, it has to be said, the framework that we have on offer in Part 3, which would, over time, allow Mr Lansley’s vision to be fulfilled. He must be hanging on to that for dear life.
We believe that Monitor is being asked to fulfil too many functions and set too many priorities, and that some of these are potentially, if not actually, in conflict with each other. We hope the House will appreciate that, on these Benches, we have done the House a big favour. We have rewritten Part 3 to make it simpler and more coherent. We have taken out the nonsense parts, such as the voting system in Clauses 116 to 121, which as it were bring the X Factor system into the NHS. Why not have phone-in votes for CCG chairs, for example?
We have taken out the convoluted and bureaucratic ideas around levies and risk pooling. After all, that is part of what the NHS is for—to pool the risks. Our advice is to keep it simple. We believe that the attempt to define the rules-based system for the NHS was always doomed. The idea that, like a true regulated market, we can set out the rules in primary legislation and contracts and then let the courts decide everything is just plain daft—unless you are a lawyer, of course. They must be salivating at the business coming their way if this Bill becomes an Act in its current form. Does the presence of excessive legality and constant contracting sound familiar? It should, because essentially that is what happens in the United States healthcare system.
We have, like Monitor, suggested that instead, the principles and rules for co-operation and competition—PRCC—that we put in place when we were in government should be left as the basis for the system. We also suggest that the Co-operation and Competition Panel should retain its role of advising on complaints about any breaches of the rules, which was at one time the Government’s position, and it may still be. For us, a defining characteristic is that the pinnacle of such a system is that there is a Secretary of State who sets the framework through the PRCC.
I would like to dispel the myth that Labour is against reform. In 1997, we came in to rescue the NHS after many years of neglect. On everything worth measuring, the NHS of 2010 was far, far better than in 1997. It is only in 2011 that we have seen it start to go backwards again, as waiting times get longer and access is restricted. Our track record on reform is there. Clearly, we did not get everything right, but we learnt. The current Administration have launched the biggest reorganisation of the NHS in its history, despite the promises that they would not and despite all the evidence that reorganisations set the NHS back two to three years, and despite the costs and risks involved—except, of course, that we are not allowed to know exactly what those risks are.
Labour introduced independent regulation of quality to the NHS. We support the continued role for Monitor with regard to foundation trusts, which we put in place. We accept the idea of extending tough financial regulation over all providers in the NHS through the use of a licensing scheme. But we do not accept the handing over of economic regulation of the NHS to a quango. We wish Monitor to retain its powers to oversee foundation trusts, and, like Sir David Nicholson, we see the value in retaining the possibility of de-authorisation of a foundation trust into a safe haven to permit restructuring and reconfiguration. But more on FTs later.
We have never been against the idea of competition. Indeed, we set out the principles and rules basis on which it could operate. We have never been against using the private sector where this adds necessary capacity or provides expertise not available within the NHS. Our experience, good as well as bad, informs our response to the Bill.
There is a place for competition. It is not, and never should be, the main driving force for reform of the NHS. We are against the promotion of competition for its own sake, as this Bill originally intended. We believe the balance between co-operation and competition is a matter for the Secretary of State to determine, in the best interests of patients, not for a quango to determine in the interests of some ideological bias.
Further along in the consideration of our amendments, we set out the process by which major reconfigurations could be proposed, consulted on and determined. We set out for the first time the idea of a rules-based failure regime. We do not see failure as a desirable feature of a market system; we see it as a failure of planning and commissioning and as something to avoid, not welcome. But if all early intervention efforts are insufficient, then an orderly rules-based administration process is necessary, so we set one out.
In all these areas, we do not oppose development of the NHS or reform. We simply fundamentally disagree with the approach being used by this Administration, which is highly disruptive and expensive and takes focus away from the Nicholson challenge. Along with the Liberal Democrats of old, we oppose the change to a regulated market at the expense of democratic control. These are the wrong reforms at the wrong time and, we add, for the wrong reason. Healthcare is not another utility to be regulated and privatised. Our NHS has as its foundation the twin principles of universality and social solidarity. It is not a candidate for conversion into a fully fledged market. We introduced regulation to give the public some independent reassurance. We introduced external assessments of quality in the NHS. The role of the quality regulator, the CQC, is unchanged by the Bill. We support the CQC, but only if it is properly resourced. We set up NICE, which is acknowledged as a world leader in its field. We set up Monitor and we think it is too early to evaluate its success, as the move to an all-FT system has taken far longer than envisaged and proved more complicated than was assumed—a lesson not yet learnt by this Government.
The job is really only half done. What we do know is that there is no miracle transformation tool. The evidence is that foundation trusts do not progress any faster than non-foundation trusts. There is little, if any, evidence that foundation trusts are more innovative, more risk-taking or more competitive than their non-FT colleagues. It is a mix.
Given the more powerful role for Monitor, we are proposing two developments to its governance. It should meet in public, like the NCB will do, and we should end once and for all the farce of shared chair/chief executive posts, which is totally against good practice. After the Mid Staffs issues, further changes to governance for regulators are on the cards. None appears to have come out of such an intense and comprehensive investigation with any credibility. The amendments about accountability are in the third group today.
We brought some forms of competition into the NHS, but we never forgot the overriding duty of co-operation. We understand that competition takes many forms. Some services might be amenable to an any-provider model, although we think that it rarely means any provider, but is more like a range of providers. Anyway, for years we have known that such a model can be considered only if five things exist: the service is easily defined; the service is discrete and not interdependent on other services; it is easy to determine the quality of what is provided; there is good quality comparative information accessible to the consumer; and there is good quality information to allow the right price to be set. So in this category, we might find eyes, teeth, pharmacy and perhaps some cold surgery, but vast tracts of the NHS do not and, we believe, never will fit in to this model.
Where these conditions do not apply, there can still be competition in the market, or even for the market, but only with a lot of downside issues to consider. We need to be clear and honest and say that, at least for the foreseeable future, for a whole swathe of services that are not amenable to any form of competition, why waste limited NHS resources on promoting competition in areas where it will not benefit patients, when those resources would be far better spent on direct patient care in a managed system? Rather than some ideologically inspired imposition of competition for its own sake, why not continue with what we started, allowing the Secretary of State to determine the boundaries for competition after due consultation and deliberation. The idea of a choice mandate is propounded by the Future Forum. The Minister might comment on why this particular offering from the Future Forum was not progressed.
We know of good examples where competition did work for patients in the area of heart surgery. Here, the collection and dissemination of good quality information on outcomes shows wide variation leading to competition between peers, but peer support and exchanges around good practices are the key to clinical changes, and so better outcomes. Equally, we know where clinical quality of better patient outcomes was achieved without any competition, though clinical leadership, strategic planning and co-operation. London’s stroke care improvements are the best argument yet for not having a wholly market-driven system.
The other key confuser here is that choice and competition are not the same thing. For the Government, competition is about choice of providers. For the patient, choice is between treatment options. Yet all the drive in terms of information systems is about league tables of organisational performance, not the key priorities for patients. Many argue for an NHS where patients and their carers are fully engaged in their own care. We know from good evidence that this brings better outcomes. The ideas of co-production are developing and featured in the responses to this Bill, but this is not about competition and choice of provider at all. Increasing competition among providers could have the opposite effect of putting barriers in the way of integrated care as an option for the patient. Reform here is not about markets or competition, but about changing clinical attitudes.
Here again we have another major departure from the ideological approach for pushing competition. For the patient, we know that integration around their needs is desired. For us, integration means bringing services to bear in such a way that it eliminates organisational boundaries, like a single care plan. But the Government see integration in terms of supply chains. We have suggested one form of what integration means for patients in an amendment, and others might do better.
The Government bang on about co-operation and competition not being opposites and use examples of how, within a market, competitors may co-operate on developments, for example in Japan. Again, this misses the point that the NHS is not a set of tradable commodities where it is irrelevant who provides the goods. For us, the key is the patient, not the organisations.
These tensions lie at the heart of our fundamental difference with the coalition Government’s approach. Health is not a commodity to be traded, patients are not consumers and choice is not about shopping. Where we might agree is on the need to continue to collect and use good quality outcome data, not just across organisations but across forms of treatment. We might also agree about the concept of contestability. Those who commission services are spending large sums of public money. We need to ensure that they do this wisely, yet we have a national Commissioning Board commissioning £20 billion of treatment with no obvious accountability and performance-managing itself. We argue that commissioners should be required to demonstrate that they periodically review all the services that they commission and make the results publicly accessible. Indeed, they should involve the public—patients as the users of the service—in the reviews. This is very like the route followed by local authorities and many parts of central government. They embraced contestability rather than simply opening every service to competition. For our crucial public services, this has to be a better and more flexible system. As long as we have commissioners who are properly accountable and the information required to deliver this accountability is in the public domain, we can have robust processes for commissioning and we do not need to make them fear legal action if they fail in some duty to promote competition properly.
I now move to the detail of the amendments in this group. Amendments 260EA and 263 specify that Monitor is to continue as the regulator of NHS foundation trusts. Amendment 261 says,
“The main duty of Monitor is to exercise its functions to support the duties of the Secretary of State”,
to promote a comprehensive health service. It also says that Monitor must protect and preserve the interests of users or potential users of the health service and seek improvement in quality and outcomes.
Amendment 262A adds to the other duties on Monitor the requirement to exercise its functions to promote the provision of a health service that,
“is based on the principles of universality and social solidarity”.
Amendment 265 leaves out the subsection stating that Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to preventing anti-competitive behaviour. We believe that the extent to which competition is appropriate is a matter for the Secretary of State, through regulations or a mandate to the board. Amendment 265ZZA would put Monitor under a duty of co-operation that would entail it promoting efficient and effective co-operation between the providers of healthcare services that further the objective of improving quality and reducing inequality of access and outcomes. The Secretary of State shall publish guidance and may issue regulations relating to this duty of co-operation.
Under Amendment 267, Monitor would have to exercise its function with a view to promoting integration of healthcare, health-related and social care services, not simply enabling it. Clause 61 relates to the power to give Monitor functions relating to adult social care. We would like to explore whether this is a good idea. We are undecided, but in the light of Southern Cross, we would like to ask whether this should be done through a specific Act, not through regulations activated at a later date.
Amendments 270B and 274ZZZA seek to simplify the role of Monitor. We would leave out some of the factors that this clause advises Monitor to have regard to. That is covered by Amendments 261 and 265ZZA. The use of resources promoting investment, research, education and training are not the main point to argue against so many other powers.
Amendment 274ZAB avoids conflicts between functions. Monitor must be set up in two separate parts: one to exercise its functions as a regulator of financial trusts; and the other to exercise its function as the licensor of providers of healthcare services. Amendment 274XAA relates to Monitor having no role in determining prices—an issue that we will be discussing later today. Amendment 277A is a new chapter that reinserts the idea of the pre-eminence of co-operation. It keeps the current system, using the principles and rules of co-operation and competition, to specify which services are to be commissioned through specified forms of competition, the Co-operation and Competition Panel to support the delivery to patients and taxpayers of the benefits of co-operation and, where appropriate, of competition, and to advise the Department of Health and Monitor on potential breaches of the PRCC. Clause stand part debates on Clauses 68 to 70 are to debate the functions referred to Monitor concurrently with the OFT and under the Competition Act 1998 and the Enterprise Act 2002. Amendment 277C would add a safeguard that before Monitor takes any actions under Clauses 68 or 69, it must have regard to the regulations made by the Secretary of State, including the PRCC, consult CCGs and the health and well-being boards, and obtain the consent of the Secretary of State.
Amendment 277D would ensure that in relation to procurement, patient choice and competition, the Secretary of State sets the rules, which will be the PRCC. Regulations dictate that procurement exercises can be undertaken only if the administrative cost of doing so is justified by the anticipated improvement in the service and is affordable, given the resources. Regulations require the board and the CCGs to discharge their functions in a way that would promote co-operation, and regulations shall not allow or require the board or CCGs to replace any existing provider that is delivering services via contract in a form approved by the Secretary of State, unless that contract has been lawfully terminated due to a breach by the provider.
Clauses 72 and 73 refer to Monitor on various powers of investigation, declaration and direction related to procurement, patient choice and competition requirements. We argue that these functions can be left to the existing Co-operation and Competition Panel. On Clause 75, we argue that the Enterprise Act 2002 should not apply to mergers involving FTs. The Co-operation and Competition Panel should apply the PRCC, not the Enterprise Act applying competition law.
On Clause 76 stand part, we argue that a review of competition is unnecessary, especially if there are not equivalent powers to review co-operation and integration. We fear that this provides a disproportionate incentive on Monitor to develop competition. Clauses 77 to 79 all apply to competition law and the role of the Competition Commission. We argue for the Co-operation and Competition Panel and the PRCC rules instead. On Amendment 288EA, guidance published by Monitor relating to its enforcement must include information on the regulations issued by the Secretary of State. Amendment 288GA and Clauses 110 to 112 are about keeping the role of Monitor in relation to authorisation and oversight of foundation trusts the same and are very similar to Amendment 288G, tabled by the Liberal Democrats. We argue that there should be no cut-off date or transition period.
I beg to move.
My Lords, I thought it might be helpful to the Committee if I intervened relatively briefly at this point to put this part of the Bill into context and explain what we are trying to achieve. Part 3 has been much discussed and, I am afraid to say, much misunderstood. It is, in my view, fundamental to the modernisation of the NHS. It is worth restating why that modernisation is so important.
We need to improve health outcomes and we need to increase productivity in the NHS. Achieving both of these is essential if we are to meet the challenges of caring for an ageing population, managing increased prevalence of chronic disease and funding the rising costs of new drugs and other technologies.
Part 3 helps to enable this by establishing a clear and comprehensive legal framework for sector regulation to protect patients’ interests, based on the principles and values enshrined in the NHS constitution. Monitor’s distinctive role would be to secure value for money in the provision of healthcare services, in the interests of patients. Its overarching statutory duty, which is crystal clear in the Bill, is to protect and promote patients’ interests by promoting economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of services while maintaining or improving quality. The key words there are “protect and promote patients’ interests”. This overarching duty would provide Monitor with a clear and enduring purpose. The duty would be the guiding principle for Monitor’s decisions, for example in resolving any conflicts that may arise in the exercise of its functions. For example, if in future Monitor were to have any doubt about a decision, it would come back to that guiding principle. Equally, it will not be open to Monitor to do anything that infringes that principle.
The duty would also provide the basis on which the Secretary of State would hold Monitor to account. Our proposals would establish a comprehensive and coherent framework for sector-specific regulation in the NHS, overseen by Monitor. For the first time, this would be applicable to all providers of NHS services, thereby fully protecting patients’ interests.
The NHS already has a competition policy, and I pay credit to the previous Government for making important advances in this area, such as the Co-operation and Competition Panel, which was described by Ben Bradshaw, who was the Minister at the time, as the NHS’s first ever competition policy. So it was, but the previous Administration took piecemeal steps, which left gaps, confusion and ambiguity. The Bill rectifies that. Under the Bill, Monitor would at the same time continue its role as the specific regulator of foundation trusts.
The noble Earl knows that that part of the Bill does that only for a limited period of time. He also knows that many people involved with foundation trusts think that should be a consistent and ongoing role of Monitor. Have the Government reassessed so that that is a more complete and comprehensive approach for Monitor, signalled clearly in the Bill?
What the noble Baroness says it quite right. It would be open to a future Secretary of State to extend the period under which Monitor retained that role. My purpose at the moment is to set out the Government’s position. I am sure we can come on to debate these things, if the noble Baroness will allow, but it is important for the Committee to have the Government’s prospectus in their minds.
The remit of Monitor would be expanded to cover all NHS-funded healthcare providers. This approach ensures that Monitor and everything that it does is governed by a single, coherent legal framework and that all its functions are bound together by a single, overarching statutory duty—the one that I read out. For that reason, I would counsel noble Lords to resist amendments that may seek to achieve similar aims, but do so by retaining a separate legal framework for regulation of foundation trusts.
Many people have sought to portray the new role for Monitor as some sort of mighty club-wielding behemoth, dictating to commissioners how NHS resources should be spent. This is not the case. Monitor’s role, as set out in Part 3, is intended to support and complement the role of commissioners, as set out in Part 2. Our aim is to empower those commissioners—GPs and other clinicians—to take the lead, arranging access to services to meet their patients’ needs and stimulating innovation and improvement. Commissioners will have various tools at their disposal to do this. They will need to decide how to use co-operation, integration and competition to improve quality or efficiency or reduce inequalities.
In that context, the appropriate role for Monitor would be to support commissioners by enabling integration and where competition is used, ensuring that this operates effectively. Monitor’s role is not—I repeat, not—to impose competition from above. Competition is not now and will not be an end in itself.
Our strategy for improving the provision of NHS services is firmly based on the principle of autonomy and accountability for providers. Building on this, we have proposed functions for Monitor that aim to strengthen incentives for providers to improve, rather than simply relying on the ability for Monitor to set and enforce rules. Promoting competition is part of this, but again the context of promoting is quite different from the idea of driving competition through top-down controls. It will not do that, and it would not be effective even if it did.
What has struck me, looking at these amendments, is that, while there are clear differences between some noble Lords and the Government, I also feel that there is a significant consensus emerging. I want to reiterate that the Government are always willing to listen to how the Bill could be improved. I have listened to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, but I have also studied very closely the amendments tabled by other noble Lords, particularly my noble friends Lady Jolly, Lord Clement-Jones, Lady Williams and Lord Marks, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy.
I am sympathetic to a number of the concerns raised by noble Lords, which we shall hear about. I would like to highlight four at this point. The first is the Secretary of State’s ability to specify matters that Monitor must take into account. I am sympathetic to noble Lords’ concerns that we should clarify the mechanisms by which this can happen. The second is the conflicts between Monitor’s functions. It has always been our intention that Monitor should take responsibility for making appropriate arrangements within its organisation to avoid potential conflicts. However, I will explore this further with Monitor in time to provide greater clarity and reassurance before Report stage. The third area is failures to co-operate. Again, I am sympathetic to noble Lords’ concerns that Monitor should have the ability to address abuses and protect patients’ interests. We believe that the safeguards in the Bill already achieve this aim, but we will look to ensure that Monitor is properly equipped to enforce this. The final issue is reviews by the Competition Commission, where I sympathise with noble Lords’ concerns that the provisions as drafted may not yet fully reflect the revisions to Monitor’s role that were introduced in response to the NHS Future Forum.
That is all that I propose to say for now. I hope that it has been helpful for me to speak early in this debate to give some additional clarity to the Government’s intentions in this vital area of the Bill.
My Lords, I very much appreciate the opening speeches from both sides on this group of amendments. I particularly recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, has put a great deal of care and consideration into the amendments that she has tabled and they represent a huge amount of work, particularly without the benefit of a Bill team. It is also clear from both speeches that now is the moment to start the debate about the application of EU and domestic competition law to the NHS.
The Bill contains a number of measures that could increase competition within the NHS at the expense of collaboration and integration and which, in my view and that of many of my noble friends, increase the risk that UK competition law will apply as if healthcare were a utility like gas or telecoms. Amendment 288G is the first of a number of amendments tabled by me and my noble friends seeking to minimise that risk.
I am not against competition in the NHS—I suspect that very few of us are—but it must be where it is appropriate. It is not appropriate in all circumstances. Public and patient benefit can often be secured in other ways. We have discussed integration of services throughout the Committee as an alternative and as a complement to competition. Having a balance and choosing the appropriate mechanism that is best for patients is what the debate about Monitor’s powers has focused on to date.
I accept that EU competition law has had some application within the health service for some years now. However, along with many others, I do not want to see EU competition law apply universally across the health service so that our commissioners and providers are required to operate a market-based NHS, red in tooth and claw, without being able to choose where it should apply and where it should not. In my view and that of my noble friends, the risk, for reasons that I shall explain, of a number of elements of the Bill being taken together increases the likelihood of NHS services being found by English and EU courts to fall within the scope of UK and EU competition law. These include, first, potential deregulation of FTs from 1 April 2016, in terms of Monitor no longer having the power to set special conditions under Clause 109 for foundation trusts. That is what Amendment 288G is designed to address. The stand part debates for Clauses 110 to 112, which I support, are also relevant.
Secondly, there are so many new areas where the Competition Commission is deployed. There is the role where Monitor has given notice to include a special condition in a licence in determining whether the matters subject to the proposed condition are potentially contrary to the public interest and whether the special condition provides a remedy. That is Clause 99. There is also its role in reviewing the development of competition in the NHS in the provision of healthcare and the exercise by Monitor of its functions in relation to the provision of healthcare services. That is Clause 76. Its role where there are objections in setting the method of setting prices for the national tariff by Monitor is in Clauses 118 onwards. Finally, there is oversight of foundation trust mergers as a result of the application Part 3 of the Enterprise Act.
Thirdly, after the potential deregulation of foundation trusts and the role of the Competition Commission, there is the lifting of the private patient income cap for foundation hospitals, in Clauses 161 and 162, which opens the way for some foundation trusts to derive the majority of their income from private patients. In that context, I am very pleased to see Amendment 299ZA, tabled by the noble Earl.
If EU competition law were to apply in an unrestrained manner across the NHS, private sector companies that bid unsuccessfully for NHS contracts could make a European competition complaint and challenge commissioning decisions in the courts, and/or the status of foundation hospitals, undermining the mainstream of the NHS in the delivery of services such as intensive care units, A&E, emergency cover, teaching, training and research. The number of such complaints across the EU has increased over recent years.
It was, of course, to minimise the risk of the unrestrained application of EU competition rules that the rules of co-operation and competition and the Co-operation and Competition Panel were devised in 2008. But this Bill, on the face of it, goes much further in encouraging competition. There is a view that the incorporation of those rules in statute is yet another reason to believe that the NHS is at risk in this way.
The applicability of domestic and European competition law to an NHS body, whether commissioner or provider, essentially turns on whether it is an undertaking for the purposes of competition law. Only a grievance between undertakings and abuses committed by dominant undertakings are within the scope of the Competition Act 1998 and Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. There is, in fact, no definition of the term, “undertaking”, in domestic or European legislation, so the scope of the term has been developed and considered through case law of the domestic and European courts.
I do not propose to give your Lordships a legal lecture—I do not believe I would be able to—but briefly, there are two cases in particular that are of some importance. The question of whether an NHS trust is an undertaking for the purposes competition law was considered by the Competition Appeals Tribunal in the case of BetterCare Group Ltd in 2002. BetterCare was a UK provider of residential and nursing home care, which complained to the OFT that the North and West Belfast Health and Social Services Trust, acting as a purchaser of nursing and residential care home services, was abusing its dominant market position in Belfast. The OFT rejected the complaint on the basis that the trust was not an undertaking for the purposes of competition law. On appeal of the OFT’s decision by BetterCare, the Competition Appeals Tribunal determined that the trust was acting as an undertaking both in the purchasing of services from BetterCare and in the direct provision of elderly care by its own statutory home. This was for various reasons, but of particular importance in the current context, is that in providing care through its own homes, the trust was also a participant in a market for residential care, alongside independent providers, and the trust was in a position to generate the effects that the competition rules seek to prevent.
In FENIN, a case brought by an association of companies involved in the marketing of medical goods used in Spanish hospitals, the European Court of First Instance in 2003 upheld a decision by the European Commission rejecting a complaint alleging abuse of a dominant position by 26 bodies or organisations, including three Ministries of the Spanish Government, which run the Spanish national health system. The Commission had rejected the complaint on the grounds that these bodies were not acting as undertakings in their dealings with suppliers. The Court of First Instance considered that where an organisation purchased goods not for the purpose of offering goods and services as part of an economic activity but in order to use them in the context of a different activity, such as one of a purely social nature, it does not act as an undertaking simply because it is a purchaser of those goods.
The complainants appealed the decision to the European Court of Justice, which, in 2006, dismissed the appeal, confirming the view of the Commission and the CFI that a purchasing activity is subject to competition law only if it is undertaken for an economic purpose, such as the supply of goods or services on a market rather than for a purely social purpose. The Commission’s argument, summarised in paragraph 24 of the ECJ judgment and accepted by the court, makes the point that it is the act of placing goods or services on a given market that characterises the concept of economic activity, not purchasing the activity as such.
By the same token, it is generally established that an entity is unlikely to be an undertaking if services are provided on a universal basis on the principle of solidarity—that is, they are funded by the state. However, as the NHS European office itself states, European Court decisions are case-specific. There is uncertainty about how they apply generally.
So it is my contention, precisely in the light of these cases, that if there is no regulation of foundation trusts by Monitor, no special licensing for foundation trusts after 2016, constant involvement of the Competition Commission and no cap on PPI of any kind, foundation trusts will risk falling within the definition of an undertaking for the purposes of domestic and European competition law. NHS trusts may well be acting as an undertaking when carrying out specific functions of a commercial nature.
At the end of the day, the question is whether there is a market for particular healthcare services. There is already a market for private patient services, which is being emphasised and expanded by the provisions of this Bill. Many of us are worried about the future for NHS providers rather than the application of EU competition law to commissioners. We are worried that our local NHS hospital, particularly if it is in London, where already the major trusts compete for private patients, will be chipped away at by private competitors. Markets could be created in a number of different areas of healthcare that it delivers. There is a danger that a hospital trust would increasingly be treated as an undertaking under European competition law across the range of its services, so that unless it competed effectively in those markets, it would no longer be viable as a local NHS facility.
It might be said that this is certainly not the case currently. Only elective surgery is really part of a market. But there is nothing precautionary in the Bill. There is nothing to prevent such a market being created or arising in the future. What is to prevent a future Government deliberately creating a market? Perhaps my noble friend the Minister can tell us. Why have nursing homes, which deliver nursing and social care paid for by public money, become subject to competition law? It is because the previous Government deliberately set out to create a market. The King’s Fund, in an excellent document of November this year, entitled Economic Regulation in Health Care: what can we learn from other regulators?, states:
“The market in health services is heterogeneous. The challenge facing the regulator will be to determine when competition is ‘appropriate’. In health care, as in other sectors, there are some services that are natural monopolies and others where competition may bring benefits. There is almost no evidence to guide this at present, although there are some ideas about how far different sectors in health care lend themselves to competition.
Monitor will need to develop a nuanced approach, balancing its proactive intervention powers to remedy market failures and its concurrent powers with the competition authorities”.
This is very laudable, but all this assumes that Monitor will be able to pick and choose what rules of co-operation and competition to apply. This Bill could open up the NHS to competition in a new and radical way in the future, even if not now. There seems to be little or nothing to prevent that taking place.
I have seen the department’s response to the counsel’s opinion by 38 Degrees, which raises the European competition issue by reference to a number of issues in the Bill that overlap with those that I have raised, and in some cases go beyond them. This does not essentially argue the case, but it simply makes assertions in response. Simple assertions will not suffice. The Department of Health needs to produce independent counsel’s opinion to back up its assertions that the risks have been properly assessed in respect of commissioning and that the contents of the Bill, particularly those areas that I have outlined, do not increase the risk of EU competition law applying, or that it intends to mitigate them by specific amendments. Failing that, on these Benches we will be seeking major changes to the Bill, and I look forward to the reply of my noble friend the Minister.
My Lords, I hope I will not be spending too much time on the excellent argument that we have heard from the noble Lord, who is a lawyer. I agree with everything that he has said, except that I want to draw attention to the absence of detail that, if we do not move now, we will confront when we face regulations on competitive markets and on the whole question of a qualified person.
Let me first say to the Minister that it should be very clear that there is no consensus whatever on this aspect of the Bill. You cannot be aware of the arguments among general practitioners, among surgeons and physicians and within the nursing and midwifery profession and still believe that there is consensus on this question of competition. There is very considerable concern. As to his assertion that all this was fundamental to the modernisation of the NHS, if this is not changed it will be fundamental to the destruction of the NHS.
Let us start with the first issue. We have evidence— like evidence-based medicine—about what unbridled competition does to a national health service. It has been referred to earlier in the debate. I recommend noble Lords to look at the question raised in the article by Colin Pritchard in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine this year, comparing health service competition policies in the USA, the UK and 17 western countries between 1979 and 2005. The conclusion is:
“In cost-effective terms, i.e. economic input versus clinical output, the USA healthcare system was one of the least cost-effective in reducing mortality rates whereas the UK was one of the most cost-effective over the period”.
This is not a health service that deserves to be turned upside down and it does not deserve to be exposed to the American healthcare system. I have had 17 years as a non-executive on the board of one of the biggest American healthcare companies, Abbott Laboratories. Many aspects of American medical scientific research are the finest in the world. Many aspects of medical and surgical care in certain specialised hospitals in the United States are undoubtedly the best in the world. There is considerable excellence, but if you look at the system overall there is a deplorable decay in quality of care in some parts of the United States, which would make a third world developed country ashamed. I am not prepared to be borne along by some vague talk of consensus on this Bill. The Bill is hated in many aspects, particularly this aspect, in the National Health Service. The BMA has said that it should be withdrawn and has calculated that it would be less disruptive to withdraw it now than for it to continue.
Let me take up some other aspects. I shall speak to the Amendments 278AA, 278BB and 278BC in my name. Amendment 278BB would insert,
“shall not commission services through competitive markets through a competition-based mechanism”.
“Competitive markets” is a term of art. It has meaning in the world of competition. The requirement to manage competitive markets arises from supra-national legislation, with a detailed regime that must be applied, specified in EU law and reflected in national law. That is an obligation to reflect the EU regime unless some clawback of sovereignty is made.
That is the situation, and it applies right across the board. Mr David Bennett, who is to be the chairman of Monitor, wrote in an article in the Times in February:
“We, in the UK, have done this in other sectors before. We did it in gas, we did it in power, we did it in telecoms … We’ve done it in rail, we’ve done it in water, so there’s actually 20 years of experience in taking monopolistic, monolithic markets and providers and exposing them to economic regulation”.
First of all, I do not concede that the National Health Service is a monopolistic, monolithic market. It is a very interesting fact, which is frequently forgotten, that the GP is an independent contractor, and has been since 1948. Many of the debates in this Chamber focused on this issue. My father was a doctor before the National Health Service. He charged patients because he had to. He hated doing so. But he was adamant that he was not going to go into a National Health Service—which he wanted and which he voted for in 1945—if he had to give up his independent contractor basis. He may have been wrong or he may have been right, but it is a massive difference in how you describe the NHS when you think of these independent contractors who have been there from the start.
There are many other aspects of the hospital basis of the National Health Service, which took on in 1948 the spirit and commitment of voluntary hospitals up and down the country. Their assets were frankly seized by the state, but fortunately a lot of their moral underpinnings and fundamental values were not. It has been one of the triumphs of the National Health Service that it has been able to take some of that voluntary spirit and keep it within the National Health Service. Why was it that for decades, hospital doctors, surgeons and physicians worked very long hours uncomplainingly? What absurdity it is that that has been taken away from them by EU regulations and we have successive Governments who all agree that it is ridiculous nonsense, but they can do nothing about it. We are about to do the same to the whole National Health Service on this EU point. This is not a minor point.
The noble Earl knows that I respect him very greatly as a parliamentarian. He has shown it day after day in the patient way in which he has examined the debates in this House, many of which have not been controversial, but have been informative and intelligent and could make some addition to this Bill. But I am afraid that on the fundamentals he speaks for a department that shows at every serious part of examination of the Bill that it is not prepared to provide us with the true facts. We had this debate about risk assessment. Let me come to the issue about competition. In 2006, a Labour Government commissioned a major study on competition and the effects on the EU. It is a scandal that I have been trying for months through Freedom of Information to get hold of this document so that we would have it before this debate.
I have been obstructed at every turn by the Department of Health. Do not tell me that it wants the facts out here so that we can discuss them and know about this issue. As the noble Lord states, as an experienced lawyer, this is an area of very great complexity and yet we are not allowed to see this study, which we have paid for. It is not the possession of the Government—it was not even commissioned by this Government—but we are not allowed to see it. What is the Freedom of Information Act about? Are you afraid of the facts? Is there something that we cannot be trusted with? We are about to legislate on a very important area, which does have an impact on the EU, and we are deprived of one of the existing studies. So, all of us have had to go around and try to get expertise in this area and it is not easy to do so.
The judgment I get from lawyer after lawyer is that the term “competitive markets” has meaning and substance in the EU. Unless we provide what I call a “French railway” clause, we will be forced by EU legislation. I come back to my earlier quotation that we have done this before in the railway system. Well, the EU has done it on our railway system but it has not done it on the French railway system. The French railway system operates on the basis of a Government who have decided that they are going to be outside EU competition law. I do not know quite how they have done it. I have had a very considerable search through the statute law of the French railway system—it has tested my French language to breaking point—but, with advice from others far more expert than me, I have put together in Amendment 278BC what I call the equivalent of a “French railway” clause. It is not good enough, of that I am quite sure, but I want the Government to focus on this issue. My wording is,
“shall operate in such a way that NHS activities remain wholly within section 1.3b of the General Agreement on Trade and Services, and within the services covered by the Limitations to the Horizontal Commitments contained in the ‘Trade in Services Conditional Offer from the EC and its Member States’ issued from Brussels on 29 April 2003”.
It is quite true that the NHS has not yet come under the full provisions of the European competition and procurement policy. Let us be clear about procurement policy; it is an extremely important aspect of this whole issue. The reason it has not been done is that, despite what a lot of people seem to think, Brussels is not always endlessly trying to pick fights. It knows that we have a National Health Service which is hugely popular and much cherished by the British people and it has not, until recently, even contemplated coming in on the NHS.
I have to admit to a story. During the 1975 referendum I was the Minister for Health and my overall boss was the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, Barbara Castle. During the referendum she made a speech saying that the NHS was threatened by the Common Market. I walked into her room and said: “Barbara, if you make another speech like that I will make a speech which will oppose every aspect of what you said and the press will say the Health department is totally divided. It will do neither us nor the NHS any good.” She listened very patiently and carefully and never made another speech, but I have to admit I was clearly wrong. The way the EU has evolved in this regard is potentially a threat to the NHS—I must say I am very surprised—but will be only if the Government decide to make it so. It will only be if we do not provide some form of “French railway” clause to ensure that this does not happen to the NHS.
I do not believe that this is actually even a party political issue. We have heard many different voices about the National Health Service in the debates here and, although I disagree with some aspects of what people think is the right way for the NHS to go, I do not detect a great wish to challenge the fundamentals. It is very clear to me, however, that if we set this Bill in motion we will find that that will happen, not because people necessarily want it to happen but because it has to happen. This is why I do not think it is sufficiently understood what this Bill will do.
“Any willing provider” or, as it is now, “any qualified provider”, sounds like a sensible thing. Why was it that the then Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, in possession of the opinion about the EU and its threat to competition policy, changed “any qualified provider” to say that the National Health Service would be the main provider? I believe that if we put that into the Bill, that alone would be our “French railway” clause, as “any qualified provider” and competitive marketing go together. We should preferably deal with both. This is a fundamental question which we must not disregard.
On studying the Bill, there is practically nothing in it about what the regulations are going to contain. We know that there will be regulations, and I do not dissent from the view that that might be a reasonable way of doing things. However, until this matter is resolved in the body of the Bill, we dare not let this issue go off to regulations. I hope that this House, on this issue at least, will be prepared to vote down the present wording. The Bill does not deserve to be submitted to the country and signed by the Queen with this provision unchanged and unchecked.
I feel strongly about the question. I believe that there is a solution, but I think that it is very hard to even begin to find that solution if the Government persist in refusing to let us see the document. I have not seen it. It may be that the document will strengthen their arguments. It may be that it will expose some of our fears as unjustified. But I urge the Minister, whom we respect, to go back to his Secretary of State and say that this document must be published in early January. They may be forced to do so. Judging from the freedom of information documents coming back to me, there is a belief that they ought to ensure that this is published.
At one stage, people did not even know which year it was. It was thought to be about 2007. Now we have at least established that the year was 2006, which is one of the reasons that I had to put in another submission. I do not think that the Government will be taken seriously when we go on to Report if we have not had that document published in time for us to examine it fully and to get other legal advice. Certainly I, for one, would consider it to be an utter disgrace if we go on to Report and vote on this whole issue of competition if the document has not been published.
My Lords, I rise first to express my regrets to the House that, ironically for reasons connected to an NHS commitment, I shall not be able to be present for a lot of our proceedings later on.
Secondly, and related to that commitment, I should declare my interest as chair of the Suffolk Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust Board.
Thirdly, I do not seek, nor am I qualified, to follow the three speeches that have preceded mine: I refer to the detail into which the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, went, the important legal points of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, and the many of the points which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, discussed. I have a good deal of sympathy with many but not all of the points that each of them made and I hope that they will be carefully addressed by the Minister when he comes to wind up. My purpose, however, is rather more limited and pragmatic.
I say to my noble friend the Minister that I would not reject out of hand the interpretation and explanation of context that he gave in the early part of this debate. I think that there are questions that still need to be answered, as has been made clear, but I am prone to give him the benefit of the doubt on the general approach that he outlined.
I particularly welcome—it is very important, given the uncertainties that we all face about the import of this Bill, underlined by the noble Lord, Lord Owen—that my noble friend gave some clear indications of areas where he thought clarification was possible and where he would give serious consideration to some of these amendments. In the light of that, I would be disinclined to try to shoot him down today, but I would not be disinclined to shoot him down—or try to shoot him down, at any rate— if we do not see some changes and improvements related to these concerns before the Report stage.
I would like to make a few pragmatic points. First, we ought to acknowledge that what is in this Bill about Monitor is a lot better than what was the previous legal situation about Monitor, where the Secretary of State had no power to intervene at all. I will come back in a different way in a moment to what Monitor took into account, but we should recognise that there are already some signs—and this relates to my experience—that Monitor has got some of the message that is emerging from this debate. I refer back to my own personal interests and experience. I have been chair of two trusts, which have been through the Monitor process. The first of them—the Royal Brompton and Harefield—did happily become a foundation trust after I had become time expired as its chair. The second one—the one I chair at the moment—was in the process of trying to become a foundation trust at the time. Indeed, I was told when I was recruited for it that my task was to get it to be a foundation trust. For reasons I will not go into, that did not prove possible and we went down a different route. My observation—it is related to my comment just now about Monitor—is that in the intervening period there had been a sharp shift in Monitor’s attitude. When I first embarked on this, there was a clear feeling—Bill Moyes, the previous chairman would not thank me for saying this—that all that mattered was the money. Bill Moyes would have denied that, but I can only tell you that that is what it felt like. Then came Mid-Staffs and the whole situation changed, as I judge it, for the better. Patient safety and quality and all those issues began to be as important, if not more important, than the financial ones—not that the financial ones are unimportant.
At any rate, I come back to the story and the plus point for Monitor. Once we had decided at SMHP that foundation trust status of our own did not look likely, we decided that the best bet was merger with the neighbouring trust, Norfolk and Waveney, because East Anglia is a coherent whole, with all sorts of synergy and the rest of it—I will not go into the arguments. So we set about getting together with them as a joint venture. The rhetoric was merger: the legality was acquisition. They were an FT and we were not— I will come back to that point in a moment as well. I have no way of describing to the House just how difficult that proved and how many obstacles were planted in the way by the process.
We were advised that acquisition was simpler than merger, which is one of the reasons we went for it. I can only say that if the Minister wants to get the many remaining trusts that are not FTs into FT status through mergers, he is going to need to make sure that it can be done more easily than was the case in the one of which I have experience. If acquisitions are easy, mergers must be a nightmare.
We originally wanted to merge last April. We have not yet merged and are now due to merge at the turn of the year, the Secretary of State willing-but I believe he has signed the orders. That is very nearly nine months later than we intended. It has been attended by all sorts of certainty, uncertainties and difficulties for morale and the service. Why? Not because it was not supported by the PCT, the SHA, the department, the two county councils, everybody, but because the Co-operation and Competition Panel issued an adverse report in the early part of the year which threw the whole process back by at last six months and, in my view, was adverse to the interests of patients. That is a tendentious view; they probably would not agree but that is my view. The good point for Monitor, backing up my earlier point, is that almost exactly two months ago Monitor came to a decision, taking account of all the factors, including the opposition of the Co-operation and Competition Panel, and it overruled the panel on the basis that the interests of patients suggested that the merger was sensible and right and should go through. That validates my suggestion that there has already been some learning.
I now come back to my other general points against the background of that experience. The most important point is that we need to be as sure as we can that patient quality and safety is given the real priority it deserves, whatever the detail of this legislation may say. That is nowhere more important than in mental health, where it is so easy to disrupt the care pathway that is now the basic way of approaching the treatment of mentally ill people. I know from my own experience that if you have different bits of care being provided in different ways by different packets of service, there is the risk of disaster if they do not all know what is going on. You need an integrated care pathway to deal successfully with these problems. So, while I have no problem in principle about competition and even less so about choice, I think it is important that where there is any doubt about which factor is going to be paramount, it has to be patient safety and quality not competition that wins the day. I hope that is what I will be hearing in the course of my noble friend’s wind-up. If not, I, along with others, will not hesitate to want to come back to this matter on Report.
My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 260EA which, as I understand it, seeks to maintain the essentials of the role of Monitor as set out in the 2006 Act. I support the extending of Monitor’s roles beyond those of foundation trusts. However, in response to the argument of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that we need to change the functions of Monitor in order to achieve cost-effectiveness, improvements in quality and productivity in the years ahead, I would argue that with Monitor as it stands, together with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the CQC—a great improvement on its predecessor—we have all the tools we need in the kitbag in order to improve our productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness.
I want to focus on one issue which I believe to be the greatest threat presented by these reforms to the improved quality and cost-effectiveness of the health service. There are two powerful reasons for avoiding the reorganisation of Monitor. The first is that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Monitor has been, in my experience, an extremely successful organisation, with one exception to which I will return. The second is that the main new ingredient is, indeed, the promotion of competition that has been addressed so effectively by other noble Lords. Although this will not be based on price, I have absolutely no doubt that it will drive financially driven decision-making.
I want to touch on these two points. Monitor is not broke, as it were. Having been on the receiving end of Monitor’s demanding regime for accreditation as a foundation trust service, I can vouch for the fact that Monitor has been the engine behind the transformation of inefficient organisations, run by boards with weak non-executive directors—who therefore offered very little professional challenge to the executive directors—weak financial systems and weak financial management. That is what we had, and that is what other trusts have had, prior to undergoing the rigorous process driven by Monitor to become foundation trusts. In my case, as chairman, I had no alternative but to get rid of my chief executive officer—no easy task but somehow this process enabled that to happen—and, indeed, to get rid of my non-executive directors. It was as simple as that. The same process continues to take place all over the country. I know this because others tell me. My belief is that we owe to Monitor, more than any other organisation with the possible exception of NICE, the fact that the NHS is now one of the most cost-effective health systems in the world, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said very clearly. We should be proud of that.
At this stage I ought to mention Mid-Staffs, because this is, indeed, the one failure to which people refer. As I understand it, the problem was that Monitor at that stage had no information about quality, and the Healthcare Commission, which at that stage was responsible for quality inspection, did not pass data to Monitor. All those problems have been resolved, and they needed to be, because without the quality information, Monitor was ill-equipped to do the job it had to do.
I come now to my second point, which is about the promotion of money-based competition. I want to emphasise “money-based”, because I support competition, but it must be based on the quality of services to patients. The promotion of money-based competition and private sector provision of health services will be a detrimental and costly experiment. We have only to look to other countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, has said, to realise that this is nothing short of a disastrous route forward. I refer to page 19 of the Department of Health’s document Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests: The Role of Sector Regulation. It states:
“Regulation and competition will always play an important role”.
I know that the word “competition” here means money-based competition: not price-based, but financially based or commercially based. It goes on to say that Monitor will,
“provide a fair playing field for all, regardless of ownership”.
I understand that the existing foundation trusts will remain as they are as long as they remain solvent. The document refers to patients wanting more choice. As we know, we can get any answer we want from surveys, as long as we ask the right questions. No patient would want more choice if they were aware of the costs and the appalling consequences of the dominance of the money motive in a commercial system. Patients want choice within the systems that we currently have.
I will not focus on the US, because we know that with health costs soaring towards 20 per cent of GDP and 30 million people excluded from remotely satisfactory health care, this cannot be a model to follow. However, Germany is held up as a good example of a health system which has worked with more competition in the system for a long time. I will start with an anecdote. A German orthopaedic surgeon we met on holiday a few years ago happily referred to the fact that he and his colleagues regularly undertake unnecessary operations if they are short of work. What was remarkable was that he seemed completely unembarrassed that this should be the case and that he should admit such a terrible thing to somebody who is used to working in a country with a national health service. It seemed completely normal; it clearly is.
I want to make available to your Lordships the more considered experience of one of the German consultants, Professor Priebe, who worked as a clinician in Germany for 17 years before emigrating—utterly disgusted with the German system—to the UK to work in the National Health Service. He gave me his comments and pleaded with me to make them available to the Government, because he is so alarmed at the thought that he escaped the German system to come over here only to be followed by something rather similar. I will try and draw on his comments as quickly as I reasonably can.
In Germany, the contractual agreement between commissioners and provider organisations define the funding arrangements. Clinical decisions are then strongly influenced by financial incentives. Computer-based algorithms have been developed to guide doctors on what diagnostic interventions and medical treatments patients should receive in order to maximise the income for the provider organisations. These algorithms consider the characteristics of the given patient as well as the characteristics of the broad category of patients with that particular diagnosis in order that the doctor achieves the,
“most profitable average treatment costs across a diagnostic group of patients”.
Is that really what we want in our country?
In Germany, evidence-based medicine and the interest of patients are much less important. In the UK in recent years, the emphasis has been more and more on evidence-based medicine; that is based, of course, on the professional work of NICE, which I have already referred to. If the drive towards competition threatens this ethos, Britain will lose something extremely precious. Competition not only reduce the flexibility needed to provide individualised effective care, but also requires ever-increasing documentation. Ministers often refer to the bureaucracy of the National Health Service, but if they had the experiences of the bureaucracies of other systems, they might be slightly less critical.
This documentation is supposed to ensure that clinicians can demonstrate that these income-generating interventions have indeed been provided. Commissioners mistrust the providers and require more controls and ever more documentation as well. This waste and inefficiency inevitably drives up costs.
Financial incentives and competition encourage commissioners to accept less costly patients. The providers are inclined to do the same. Here is another major fault in the system. As a result, patients with severe and chronic disorders become disadvantaged. It is no accident that mental health services are relatively well funded in this country, when compared to these competition-based systems, though I should emphasise that even in the UK, mental health remains the Cinderella of the health service.
Financial incentives also lead to the prescription of useless treatments—my anecdote makes the point—and the over-provision of services. Apparently, this is widely known across the German system. The providers then argue for the funding for all these unnecessary operations and superfluous services.
Competition and fragmentation of local service systems create the need for more referrals and associated paperwork and further increased costs. There are multitudes of downsides from these financially driven systems. Our consultant concludes that,
“most of these downsides of a more market orientated system appear to be intrinsically linked to the promotion of competition in health care and to having a system based on independently negotiated contracts rather than one controlled by agencies that are directly accountable to the public”.
In this country, we know from other sectors that markets do not work. The name Jarvis will mean something. Jarvis was, of course, the private maintenance company for the rail companies. Jarvis was found negligent following various rail disasters and, of course, Jarvis no longer exists.
Do we really want to generate these risks of negligence in the health sector? Surely not. I realise that at this point in time, the plan is not to go all the way down the rail route, but the direction of travel is extremely clear and I have no doubt that that is where we shall arrive unless there are safeguards within this Bill to prevent it. Some may point to the apparent savings achieved by fundholder GP practices. The evaluators apparently found, however, that GPs bumped up their prescription costs immediately before becoming fundholders by going to special drugs only to return to generic prescribing once they became GP fundholders.
These are the sorts of games that people play when driven by financial incentives. The OECD makes clear in its recent report that the evidence simply is not there that markets work in the health field. To briefly mention the US, they have extraordinarily low bed occupancy compared with the UK. Why? Because they need lots of beds to be available in order to deal with competition. It is not clear how many patients are actually going to come to them at any point in time, so there is excess supply driven into the system.
In conclusion, the NHS already has very strong competition, but of an entirely healthy variety. I strongly support this. We need competition. We like it as human beings. At the East London NHS Foundation Trust, we pore over the benchmarking information from Monitor and the CQC—I was doing so yesterday, as it happens. We are very concerned about how we are doing and the quality of our services relative to our competitors around London.
I am not against competition but I am against financial competition. I appeal to the Minister, even at this very late stage, to do all that he can to preserve the public service ethos and the healthy competition that we already have, and to avoid at all costs the deeply unpleasant results of replacing competition based upon the best possible care of patients with the money motive.
My Lords, I would like to make a very few remarks on competition versus co-operation from a clinical rather than a legal position, as I am baffled by the complex legality of the amendments on Monitor.
As the noble Earl knows, like many others I have always had concerns about the wisdom of introducing market competition into healthcare. Co-operation and collaboration between providers should always be the norm for the benefit of patients and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said, it is much less costly. However, it is good to know that competition is now to be on quality and not on price. This removes, theoretically at least, the race to the bottom which has been shown to result in worse outcomes in a number of studies, particularly, as other noble Lords have pointed out, in the United States.
Recently there have been three studies in the UK on competition in healthcare, of which that by Zack Cooper and colleagues at the LSE, looking at hospital data covering 400,000 admissions from 2003 to 2008, is the largest and the best known. They claim to show that competition on quality can improve the outcome for patients with a myocardial infarction or coronary thrombosis. Although carefully conducted, and allowing for many variables, the paper has been criticised by statisticians for the elementary but common scientific mistake of equating correlation with causation.
The mortality rate certainly did fall in the hospitals deemed to have been involved in choice and competition. They were deemed to be such because they were close to other comparable hospitals, mostly in urban areas. The researchers were unable to measure competition as such, which of course is a weakness of the study. The mortality rates in these hospitals were compared to those in hospitals outside these areas with more scattered populations who were likely to have less choice and to use only one hospital. However, differences in the mortality rate could have been due to a number of clinical and diagnostic factors, unconnected to competition, which applied more to the urban than the provincial hospitals. For instance, the urban areas were more likely to contain teaching hospitals, which often lead on the introduction of new treatments.
Another report deemed to show that competition is beneficial was commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons. It showed that outcomes for elective surgery at independent sector treatment centres were better than those for similar procedures carried out in National Health Service hospitals that also offered emergency care. This is not surprising, for several reasons. The patients at the ISTCs were younger and in better general health; they came from more affluent areas; and they were less likely to have co-morbidities. Therefore, the surgeons at the ISTCs had a more straightforward task and by concentrating on a few surgical procedures may have become more skilled in that limited area.
There is nothing to stop National Health Service hospitals setting up dedicated wards and teams to concentrate on routine operations, with doctors working in those sections being protected from being diverted to treat more urgent or seriously ill emergency cases. A number of National Health Service hospitals have done this quite successfully, providing treatments at a lower cost than those commissioned from the private sector. Two years ago ISTCs received some 11 per cent more remuneration than the National Health Service for doing the same work. Of course I am aware that the National Health Service sometimes needs the private sector to clear a backlog. However, this should be temporary, if only for economic reasons. As many other noble Lords said, competition is welcome and necessary within the National Health Service but should be between hospitals, clinicians and other providers vying to be judged the best. In most cases there is only a temporary need to use commercial, competitive providers. I hope that these general remarks have helped the debate.
My Lords, I will intervene only briefly because most of the points on competition were made very eloquently, in particular by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Owen. My amendments would rather more crudely delete references to anti-competitive behaviour. One thing I will draw to the Committee's attention is that the terminology maximises the chances of this going wrong. The earlier version of the Bill referred to “promoting competition”—in other words, encouraging more providers—which was a relatively benign intervention if one believes that that is the way to go. By referring to “preventing anti-competitive behaviour” we are turning Monitor from being an accreditor and promoter of more providers to being the policeman of the nascent market. That will put it in a very vulnerable position.
All competition and sector regulators that have this duty are inevitably faced with appeals, complaints and other interventions by unsuccessful providers or potential providers, which go through a quasi-legal process with the regulator. The Bill provides that if that is not acceptable, the issue may go to the competition authorities, which rely on the general principles of competition and also—as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, eloquently underlined—of procurement law. Therefore, in almost every case of commissioning the allocation of the contract will be opened to appeal on the grounds that it overrides competition. However, as noble Lords said, there are hundreds of thousands of situations where collaboration and integration, vertically and horizontally, and even mergers between providers, would be in the interests of patients. The Minister said that clearly in all cases the interests of patients were the most important issue. Indeed, the very useful document describing Monitor’s role states that the regulations would help ensure that competition is not applied inappropriately, and only ever in the interests of patients. Well, that is what we would all wish to see. I certainly would not wish to deny Monitor the ability to encourage competition, but if there is an appeal against a particular award by a particular commissioning body, Monitor and the higher courts have to be in a position of judging whether or not the award was in the interests of patients. That seems a severe restriction on the ability of Monitor to provide its general services because it will be engaged in all these cases of complaint and appeal.
There are things that would fit in with the Government’s overall philosophy— which in this area I do not happen to share—but that would not open the door to such a multitude of appeals and to the wider application, referred to by other noble Lords, of both general EU and UK competition and procurement law, which would tie large parts of the National Health Service up in knots.
My Lords, Amendment 278BA in my name will appear later this afternoon under Clause 71. In view of the discussion so far, however, I think it appropriate that I make my comments now.
This is a probing amendment on which I hope the Minister will be able to provide some clarification. The amendment seeks to address the maintenance of quality standards across all qualified providers, be they NHS, private or the voluntary sector, in three key areas. We have heard mention already today about “any qualified provider” and this is the area on I wish to spend some time. One of the current issues with private sector contracts is that when serious complications arise, requiring intensive care facilities, the patients invariably end up in the NHS. Continuation of care is essential in all areas but it is particularly important in the area of surgery. The experience of the independent sector treatment centres in the NHS, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Rea, and others, has not always been a happy one for the medical profession. If the noble Lord, Lord Warner, who has championed their introduction, was here he would have taken some comfort from the recent report that the noble Lord, Lord Rea, referred to.
When I was president of the Royal College of Surgeons I actually instituted a national audit to compare outcomes of care between the NHS treatment centres and the NHS. The Patient Outcomes in Surgery audit was launched in 2007 by the Royal College of Surgeons and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I said at the time:
“This Audit will provide solid evidence as to whether patient outcomes differ between the ISTCs and the NHS. It is imperative that patients receive a sustained, safe and quality service, which is consistent”—
and that is the point, consistent—
“across surgical providers”.
The outcome of the audit, published this October, analysed four operations: hip and knee replacements, hernia and varicose vein surgery across both provider types. It found that the outcomes from the ISTCs were equal to or generally better than the NHS where both elective and emergency patients were treated. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Rea, made the point that the NHS deals with emergency patients as well. The report highlighted the fact that the patients treated in these centres were younger, fitter, healthier and less likely to have co-morbidities than their NHS counterparts, making them a lower risk for complications.
Jan vanderMeulen, professor of clinical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, points out:
“Independent sector treatment centres treat only non-emergency cases. The separation of elective surgical care from emergency services is likely to have a positive impact on the quality of care, irrespective of whether the elective surgery is carried out by a private company or the NHS”.
This is something that I believe passionately: the exercise of the ISTCs has demonstrated that if we separate functionally elective from emergency care, we will improve the quality of care for patients, irrespective of whether that is done in the private sector or within the NHS.
There is a downside, however, and this was pointed out by Professor Norman Williams, current president of the Royal College of Surgeons, when he warned,
“we need to guard against any drift that could destabilise hospitals. Sicker patients have needs that only a comprehensive hospital can provide”.
There is a danger that if you move a lot of care over to ISTCs and so on you may destabilise the acute services in the NHS.
Any qualified provider offering a surgical service must adhere to and abide by the same standards as NHS providers. We called for a level playing field in 2007 with respect to ISTCs and it is interesting to note that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is not in his seat, said in a speech to the NHS Confederation in March 2007:
“We want an even playing field between the NHS and the independent sector. Patients, wherever they are treated, should be assured that the regulation is consistent”.
I would echo the words of the noble Lord and ask the Minister to reassure us that there will be a level playing field, not the inequalities which led the Health Select Committee to report on 13 July 2006 that the first wave of ISTCs cost 11 per cent more on average than the equivalent NHS cost and that some ISTCs delivered only 50 per cent of the cases they were contracted to treat. I believe the tariff would address this but I seek assurances none the less. We wish to see the end of cherry-picking and spot-purchasing and a return to a level playing field for all providers. This Bill will help to cement the role of the private sector in surgery but there needs to be regulation by Monitor to ensure that private providers deal with their own complications and do not become a burden on the NHS. The provisions that have been put in place, such as the requirement to treat patients within 30 days of discharge, are a way forward but do not complete the picture.
The second area relates to the NHS Outcomes Framework 2011-12 which aims to provide a national-level overview of how well the NHS is performing and to act as a catalyst for driving quality improvement and outcome measurements, some of which I have already referred to in relation to the Patient Outcomes in Surgery audit. Quality standards set by NICE will drive the initiative and must be met by all providers, including the private sector and any qualified providers. This is what I assumed the “qualified” part meant. Originally we talked about any “willing” provider and we now refer to “qualified”. As I said, the use of indicators such as the emergency readmission within 28 days of discharge, while an important first step, does not capture non-acute complications like failed hip or knee replacement operations which will require revision surgery. Monitor must have the ability to ensure that all qualified providers adhere to the NHS outcomes framework and this amendment would make that possible. If all qualified providers are required to strive for the goals set out in the outcomes framework, the health of the nation will be improved and this will undoubtedly meet one of the ultimate goals of this Bill.
We discussed education and training earlier so I will not go into that in detail. However, it is important to point out that the first wave of ISTCs was contracted without any need to include education and training. Efforts were made to introduce education and training in the second wave of ISTC contracts but I have no evidence that this actually took place. In the private sector this was not an issue when private beds were within the NHS. Junior doctors used to work in private hospitals providing night cover and receiving some training during the day. These arrangements have more or less ceased and there is no structure for formal training in private hospitals, unlike the structures in some hospitals in the United States. As more and more procedures are done in the private sector—currently an estimated 7 per cent of all elective referrals—trainees are losing the valuable opportunity to observe the many different types of procedures and surgery in hospitals. Monitor must be given the power to correct what has been a training deficit by requiring all providers to have a contractual commitment to education and training and to deliver the standards and outcomes agreed and published by the profession. The royal medical colleges stand ready to undertake the quality assurance of training which, in the case of surgery, can only be done by those who have front-line experience in the speciality in question
The Prime Minister’s speech last Monday introducing a strategy for UK life sciences highlighted once again the importance and value of translational research and the need to get innovation to the bedside as quickly as possible. The £180 million catalyst fund will help to move medical innovation closer to patients and my amendment would allow Monitor to regulate to encourage all providers to engage and participate in research.
The need for equity between the private sector providers and the NHS is pressing. There needs to be a mechanism in place to ensure that any qualified provider, irrespective of the sector, is held to account using the same standards in regards to professional guidelines, education and training, research and the NHS outcomes framework. Amendment 278BA seeks to address this issue and foster debate among noble Lords. I very much hope that the Minister will address some of these points in his response.
My Lords, I have listened very carefully to the debate. I think that it has been one of the best that we have had. I pay tribute to those who have taken part, and especially to the Opposition, for introducing it so fully.
I, too, have been connected with the health service since 1948. Like the father of my noble friend Lord Owen, my father was a GP. This resonates with what the noble Lord was saying about paying for services. My brother is a consultant and I work daily with the NHS—rather, I wish that it was daily. I run my own business, and, sadly, it is not quite daily. However, I want to declare that I run Cumberlege Connections, and that we do not provide any patient services to the NHS. We provide training for doctors, nurses and those working in the service.
Reading the evidence that has come forward from the King’s Fund, from the Nuffield Trust and from other bodies, nearly all of them have said that the NHS needs to improve. Looking at the research, I think that is absolutely true. We have to look forward: the NHS is facing enormous challenges. Our population is changing; it is getting more diverse, as well as growing older. The NHS needs to innovate and adapt to meet the new expectations of patients.
I have had treatment over the past two years in hospitals and have been very interested in how care was given. However, patients have had to sit in out-patient departments, queuing as my mother used to queue just after the war, when there was rationing. Sir Muir Gray, a very respected member of the medical profession, has said that the out-patient department is a relic of the 19th century. So we have to change. I think of banking—perhaps that is not a very good example at the moment. However, at one time we used to have to queue to get our money at a counter. Then the banks introduced a hole in the wall. I remember Barclays saying, “Our customers are much too important to have to go to the impersonal ‘hole in the wall’; we are going to give them personal service at the counter”. No—the public wanted cash quickly, and they went to the hole in the wall. Now we can do our banking in our sitting rooms. The world is changing so fast, and the NHS cannot be stuck in aspic. We really must move on.
I am, therefore, very interested in the debate and the question of choice. One of your Lordships said the NHS was not a shopping spree, or something like that. However, there is a huge amount of competition within the NHS. Would-be doctors compete for medical schools, for a start. Actual doctors compete for the very best jobs in the NHS. NHS hospitals compete with private practice for consultants’ time and compete with non-healthcare employers to retain nurses. GPs have been partly competing for NHS patients since 1948; so have hospitals since 1991. Companies compete to provide the NHS with new medicines and diagnostics. NHS researchers compete for grants. The NHS competes with schools, prisons and the Armed Forces for public funding. So competition in the NHS is both long-standing and inevitable. It involves not a yes/no ideological choice, but pragmatic and nuanced judgments about how, not whether, to make use of it. Competition gives NHS patients choice. The phrase, “I want a good local hospital” is a familiar refrain, just like the desire for good local schools and shops. Yet the very fact of choice and its implicit challenge, as we have seen in the previous Government’s introduction of independent sector treatment centres, actually shakes up the NHS providers. It is the grit in the oyster that helps to create a better service with higher standards.
Looking at choice and Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests, which has been produced by the Department of Health on the role of sector regulation, it was interesting that 81 per cent of respondents wanted more choice in where they are treated; 79 per cent wanted more choice in how they are treated; 75 per cent wanted a choice of hospital consultant in charge of their care; and 75 per cent of respondents wanted a choice of which hospital consultant is in charge of their children’s care. Women and older people, in particular, want to see more patient choice in the NHS. Nine out of 10 people over the age of 55 want to have a greater say in how and where they are treated. So we know that people want more choice, and that choice can go beyond the NHS and into the independent sector; we have got good examples of where that is happening successfully.
It is important that we go with the Government on expanding the opportunities for people to choose the care that they want and where they want it, but we know that if it is going to work well we need a robust economic regulator. That is absolutely essential. That regulator needs to support plurality of provision for NHS patients. In the Bill, we see that Monitor will ensure that tendering to provide services to NHS patients is not unfairly rigged—that is really important; that cost does not take precedence over quality, as has already been said; that the tariff is set independently of politicians in Whitehall, and we do want a very independent regulator; that essential NHS services of patients are protected; and that patient choice is unrestricted without destabilising the NHS. That is what we should be aiming for.
I am grateful to my noble friend for clarifying some of these issues in his opening speech. We have seen problems. We have seen spot-purchasing; that has got to go. We have seen cherry-picking; that has got to go. We have seen a race to the bottom on price; that has got to go.
There is huge merit in the Bill. I see the creation of an independent sector regulator as one of the great benefits in the Bill, which will facilitate the development of a forward-looking NHS that can undertake efficient investment and support sustainable growth. It is right that the Government should set the framework—that is what we are proposing in the Bill—and it is right that the Government should retain oversight of Monitor as it does of other sector regulators.
I had a very interesting conversation with the regulator for the railways. It is interesting how she is managing that business. Many of us will know Anna Walker, who used to be the chief executive of the Healthcare Commission, and have seen her go from one regulator into another, and how she is managing that. There are some good parallels that we can learn from. Looking at telecoms, there was no intention that BT should remain a monopoly, or that it should go. It is still with us, but it gave other people choice, working through a good regulator.
I am very much in favour of what has been proposed. It moves the health service into this century, because a lot of it is still in the last. It will offer patients and the public a far better service than we have now.
My Lords, I want to ask the Minister questions, although the debate tempts me into other things. I will start with the other things.
I found the debate fascinating. I have also found some of the re-writing of history fascinating. The previous Government introduced competition, and I am very proud of what the previous Government did in rescuing the health service, as my noble friend on the Front Bench said. The reality is that when we introduced ISTCs there was no pricing in the National Health Service. There were no tariffs. Nobody knew what it cost. The amount of money that the private sector charged was substantially reduced because we put a charge on it, but we had to do something to create the market. I have been extremely frustrated by the Minister saying, again and again, that we introduced preference for the private sector. We were taking the very first steps to introduce architecture which could allow the comparison that he now makes in order to get to a level playing field. However, there was nothing there that would have allowed the previous Government to introduce the architecture of a level playing field from the beginning. I remember discussions at the time with organisations such as Bupa which were really concerned that we were bringing down the amount that the NHS would pay them per patient once we introduced tariffs and pricing.
That was a significant development. It then allowed other developments to take place. Yes, it has allowed the Government to take a comprehensive look at all of this, although, as we have been reminded on occasion, the Government did not need ideologically to say that they had to completely open things up. The Government have admitted that 90 per cent of what they wanted to do could have been done without this legislation. I now suspect that the Government wish that they had never embarked on this in the way that they have done. It has actually meant that most people out there think that, following the pause, there will be no competition. Some of them will be surprised by the debate that we have been having today and, indeed, the debate that we had a couple of weeks ago.
The introduction of foundation trusts was very significant and a real revolution. It said that you had to take control in your own area and be responsible for how you were organising hospital services. That principle is very important. Given the changes that the Government are making in allowing the Secretary of State to intervene in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Newton, described earlier, can the Minister assure me that that will not mean that the Government will be tempted to, for example, raid the successful FTs to ensure that they cover up with sticking plaster those which are not succeeding and therefore not take the difficult decisions?
We are having the debate while, outside, there have been significant reports from the King’s Fund and comments from my noble friend Lord Darzi about the challenges in London. Those challenges will demand that the Government recognise that you cannot have comprehensive healthcare that works effectively, let alone efficiently, on every street corner. There will have to be places that specialise in hips and knees. The noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, talked of the efficiency of ISTCs. Although it is within an NHS hospital, there is what is essentially an ISTC in Epsom. The hospital, from what I read, may be having problems generally, but its unit that just does hips and knees is now the most efficient in Europe, if not the world. It has done incredible things to make it so, such as buying a taxi firm so that it can ensure that it gets people there and so does not lose any slots. That, of course, helps with efficiency.
We are going to face very different challenges and the Government have to be careful that they do not introduce architecture that institutionalises the superiority of hospitals. One of my concerns about our discussion is that sometimes we reinforce the centrality of hospitals in the modern healthcare system when we should not. We ought to be embedding the centrality of the patient pathway, which is much more about the patient’s experience before they go to hospital and after they leave hospital than the period—I hope it will be shorter and shorter—that they are actually in hospital. That is where competition will play an increasingly important part. There has to be some sort of regulation of other providers but it has to be done in a way that does not reinforce hospitals. This has been the experience of Monitor to date, so is it going to be most effective to have it regulating other bits of the architecture? There needs to be regulation of the private sector and of the voluntary sector that are providing pieces of patient care. How do we do that in a way that does not reinforce hospital care?
I have been fascinated by today’s discussion of the European Union and whether the NHS will be subject to the competition law. I remember very well, as Housing and Regeneration Minister, trying to negotiate with Mario Monti, who simply did not understand that we would frequently want to give support from the public sector, but to have that matched from the private sector. That was seen as anti-competitive and a real problem. I do not want the NHS to get involved in that architecture. I would love the Minister to comment on what his colleague Simon Burns said in the Commons. Mr Burns agreed that the application of EU competition law was inevitable but also desirable. Does the noble Earl concur with his friend in the Commons?
I have also been fascinated by the discussion around how competition is to be measured and the fact that we are now going to measure competition on quality as well as price. Ideologically I support that absolutely, but I am not sure how you do it, and I want to know how the Minister intends that to happen. What is it that will be measured so that, at a local level, proper decisions that are not contestable in court are made around the wording currently in the Bill? We all want to get there but the reality is that it is very difficult to find an objective measure that will be clear about the quality of patient care. We have a long way to go in terms of getting an architecture that will deliver the health service that the majority of people want to see where the patient is at the centre of every decision. I have been impressed with the foundation trust board that I have joined in Durham and Darlington. The businessmen on the board are saying that if you get patient care right, the financial decisions will become much easier and more straightforward. I believe that but we have to be able to get there. The real problem is that the Government have got so many things confused that people out there do not see it as simple. They see it as a confused and muddled agenda that has objectives which do not look for a patient pathway that is clear and open to the patient, with the patient getting a hold of how they can be more in control of that pathway. That is where we all want to get to. I am just not sure that the Government have got us there.
Does the noble Baroness agree with me about the pricing of ISTCs? As a surgeon I had a perfectly good idea of the cost of operations in the private sector because I did private work. I also had a reasonable idea of how much it cost in the NHS. One of the principal reasons why the Labour Government introduced ISTCs was to act as the grit in the oyster to challenge the NHS to reduce its costs and to improve the quality of its care. The issue was not just that the Government did not know what the actual price was going to be.
It certainly was not. I do not believe that the previous Government ever acted just on price, despite what the Minister keeps alleging. The noble Lord might have known what the price was but the price in his hospital was very different from the price in another hospital. One of the problems was that there was massive inconsistency across the health service, and that was being addressed. The Government were also challenging everyone involved in healthcare to be honest about what they were doing and to put patients at the centre, making sure that they got treated more quickly—a very important issue for us and our commitment to the public—and as fairly and as well as possible. We were able to get more consistency by driving through a price mechanism.
Is it not the case that procedures can be more easily and more cheaply carried out in the private sector in many instances than in the National Health Service because the costs in the National Health Service must take into account all the other responsibilities of the NHS, including responsibilities for education and training and many other things in which the private sector is not at present involved?
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to what has been a first-class debate. While I will not repeat what I said earlier, the value of this summing up will be in me responding to some of the specific questions and points that have been raised by noble Lords.
The debate has demonstrated broad agreement, if I am not putting words into noble Lords’ mouths—no doubt they will tell me if I am—that competition, when used appropriately, has an important role to play in realising what we all want to see in the NHS. It should be a means of improving the quality of care and productivity in the health service, and of improving patient choice, including choice of treatment. I would like to believe, from what noble Lords have said, that there is no disagreement about that as a general principle. It is consistent with the policies of the previous Government, reflected in published statements on behalf of all the main political parties over the years.
A further area of potential consensus appears to be on the merits of sector-specific regulation that is applicable to both commissioners and providers, with the starting point being the existing principles and rules for co-operation and competition in the NHS, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made clear.
Speeches from several noble Lords demonstrated the concern that competition law should never be applied to the NHS. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, in particular, expressed that view very forcibly. However, that is not in the gift of the Bill. The Bill provides for Monitor to consider cases of potential breaches of the Competition Act 1998, to undertake market studies and to determine where and when matters should be referred to the Competition Commission for investigation under the Enterprise Act 2002. Establishing concurrent powers for Monitor would not extend the scope of competition law or its applicability to the NHS.
If that is the case, why do 20 clauses in this part of the Bill refer explicitly to the Competition Commission and the panoply of competition law? Should they not be there?
They are there because this is the first time that any Government have attempted to bring together under one umbrella the disparate parts of our existing system for regulating and controlling competition. As I said earlier, we have that system in skeletal form, but there are lots of gaps and inconsistencies. By bringing them under one umbrella, as this Bill does—I am afraid that it inevitably occupies a goodly number of clauses—we will have a coherent system of regulation for the future.
Establishing concurrent powers for Monitor would not extend the scope of competition law or its applicability to the NHS; that is an important point for noble Lords to appreciate. Why have a sector-specific regulator? For me, the reason is that, instead of such matters being reserved for the Office of Fair Trading, Monitor will be able to lead on these issues in its capacity as a regulator with statutory duties to protect and promote patients’ interests and to enable integration, and as a body with much greater knowledge and expertise of healthcare compared with the Office of Fair Trading. That would include, for example, where arrangements such as clinical networks, which may restrict competition, deliver overriding benefits to patients. Just because there is no competition, that does not mean that the behaviour in question is anti-competitive.
That view was forcibly brought out by the NHS Future Forum. As I have said, competition is just one of the tools available to the commissioner in securing access and improving services, and it will be the commissioner, not Monitor, who will decide where and how to use it. That is not new. The use of competition—for example, through competitive tendering—is already well established in the NHS. A range of providers—NHS, voluntary, and independent—are contributing to improving services for patients.
Of course I understand the passion with which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, spoke; my concern is that his amendments would remove from the Bill a protection for patients in relation to the actions of commissioners. That is very important; if the noble Lord’s amendments were accepted we would have commissioners taking decisions that were not overseen or checked in any way, which would be very dangerous. It would also be a backwards step from the existing principles and rules that apply to primary care trusts and that were introduced by the previous Government. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, said very interestingly that according to his research the French railway system is not subject to EU competition law. I defer to his knowledge of French railway legislation but, as is made clear in the OFT’s recent guidance, the issue of whether competition law applies requires an analysis of the activity in question. To insert a clause into the Bill just to say that EU competition law shall not apply to the NHS would not achieve that aim. EU competition law is a fact, so we have to ensure that the system that we put in place protects patients against breaches of the law and that when breaches do occur they are remedied effectively.
What about the issue of letting the House have the information that was produced for the previous Government before they came forward with their proposals? Is he prepared at least to look at that question, which is currently before the Information Commissioner?
I shall indeed look very willingly at that question and I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising it. Although I might not appear to be at times, I am very keen to be as open as possible about as much as possible. Whatever I can do to facilitate this I will, although it is not a matter that I have been directly involved in.
Can I take the Minister back to the all-important matter of Monitor? I think he said this morning that he recognised that there were potential conflicts of interest in Monitor’s role. Monitor will continue to have its role of oversight over foundation trusts until 2016. The Minister has said today that that can be continued beyond 2016. Monitor will now be given responsibility for competition policy: in other words, for all the supply side, whether private sector, independent, or foundation trust. Is there not a conflict with Monitor having this responsibility for foundation trusts and then being responsible for the oversight of the rules of competition and the supply side? Monitor will also be responsible for oversight on the other side: the commissioning and customer side. Is this not an intensely problematic situation, and will the Minister say how he intends to resolve these issues?
My Lords, the noble Lord, not for the first time, is ahead of me. It is no accident that we have a group of amendments that deals with potential conflicts and how these are to be resolved. It might be better, if the noble Lord agrees, to wait an hour or two until we reach those amendments.
My noble friend Lord Newton indicated from his own personal experience that mergers, when they occur, are far too bureaucratic. I fully agree with him. The Department of Health, the Co-operation Competition Panel and, if it involves a foundation trust, Monitor, all currently play a role and may have conflicting views which lead to uncertainty and delay. Our proposals would create a simpler and much more streamlined process for the NHS.
My noble friend indicated his strong view that safety and quality—not competition—should be paramount. I am sure it will not have escaped his notice that improving quality is what these reforms are meant to be about. We have been clear that patients’ interests, especially their safety and the quality of the services they receive, have to be paramount. That is why Monitor’s overriding purpose is to protect and promote patients’ interests. It is why the board will have a duty to improve quality, why the CQC will underpin quality; and why competition will be used only as a means to improve quality. Where there are better ways to improve quality—and there may be—they will be used instead.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, in his extremely interesting and—I do not mean to sound patronising—well-informed speech, took us through some of the intricacies of competition law. Although he did not say this, there has been a suggestion from a number of quarters that we are in a knowledge-free zone when we look at competition laws applied to the NHS. In one sense that is true because there is no case law that can guide us, but in another sense it is not true.
We can say many things with confidence. The point of competition law is to protect people from self-serving abuses like collusion or abuse of market power by restricting access to services. These self-serving abuses that harm patients are already prohibited in the NHS by the principles and rules for co-operation and competition, as introduced by the previous Government. This is not something new introduced by the Bill. Competition law applies to foundation trusts only in so far as they are acting as an undertaking, as my noble friend indicated—in other words, only where they are providing goods and services within a competitive market. Given the lack of directly applicable case law to NHS providers, there is some uncertainty about where that line is drawn.
A body can be an undertaking for some activities and not others. That is very clearly laid out in the OFT’s recent guidance, Public Bodies and Competition Law. For example, the foundation trust might be an undertaking for elective surgery, if it were provided in a competitive market, but it would be very unlikely to be an undertaking when providing NHS services in the absence of competition and while under a licensed obligation to maintain service continuity, which it could well be if Monitor chose to build that into its licence. In so far as foundation trusts may in the future be found to have abused their market power, what would then follow? It is important to understand what the consequences would be. In that situation, Monitor—
Before the noble Earl moves on, I would like to be completely clear. Is the Minister saying that Monitor will decide which parts of the NHS are subject to competition law—and not the Secretary of State?
My Lords, competition law potentially applies to the provision of services throughout the NHS. Monitor is there to protect patients from breaches of competition law, as it perceives them to be. The noble Baroness is right that it will not be the Secretary of State who makes those judgments. We are charging Monitor with that duty as a sector-specific regulator. I hope I have answered the noble Baroness’s question; if I have not, I am very happy to write to her on that.
In a situation where a foundation trust was found to have abused its market power, Monitor or the OFT would have the power to remedy the breach and impose proportionate sanctions, which might be a fine, or it might be to set aside a collusive agreement or to apply to the courts for a director disqualification. The effect would be to ensure that the anti-competitive conduct and the associated harm were addressed. That can be only a good thing. It is in the interests of patients, and it prevents the whole thing escalating further. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, indicated his doubts that there was any evidence that competition really did drive up quality. If he will allow me, rather than taking up time now, I will write to him, because there is quite a deal of evidence to indicate that it does drive up quality.
On reflecting upon the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked a moment ago, Monitor will not decide whether competition law applies; Monitor will apply the law as it exists. In the end, only the courts will decide the question that she put—certainly not the Secretary of State.
In a way, that goes back to my original question: will the Secretary of State no longer decide, for example, that accident and emergency will be exempt from competition law? Will Monitor decide? Could the noble Earl please be patient with me and give me an example of what will be exempt and what will not be exempt, and who takes that decision? Is he saying that Monitor takes that decision and that if Monitor gets it wrong, the matter goes to the courts?
Monitor would ask itself: is the arrangement we are looking at for, let us say, an A&E department that had no competition for miles around, anti-competitive? The answer might well be no, it is not. As I said earlier, the very fact that there is no competition to a service does not mean that it is anti-competitive. Monitor will make a judgment on whether the service is operating in the interests of patients. However, I think that we are getting into an area where it would be beneficial to have a letter from me setting out exactly how the law is applied and by whom.
I apologise for interrupting the noble Earl. However, to guide the letter, I want to point out that one of the key things is economic activity by the foundation trust concerned. Whether it is engaging in economic activity will, to some degree, be predicated by the behaviour of the decision of the NHS Commissioning Board and the CCGs on whether it is appropriate that there should be a market in particular services from the provider. That gets another actor, or actors, into the equation. This is one of the matters that concerns many of us, because it means that it will be possible in the future, even where no competition currently exists, for competition to be introduced and therefore for Monitor effectively, legally, to have to treat foundation trusts as undertakings.
My noble friend speaks with great expertise. It would be helpful if I could cover that point when I write, as he suggests.
The noble Baroness has indicated that it would be better to retain the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a separate body. I am very clear that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and his team have done an excellent job within the Co-operation and Competition Panel since it began its work in 2009. The panel has published important reports on NHS consultants and patient choice; their specific investigations have resulted in direct benefits to patients, such as improved access to primary care in the Kingston-upon-Thames area—that is one that I know of. However, I would not advocate retaining the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a separate organisation, because that would result, in my view, in unnecessary fragmentation and, indeed, duplication. The arrangement we have at the moment has resulted in undue delays and duplication of resources, as the decision-makers have inevitably sought to review the panel’s investigations before taking any action. My noble friend Lord Newton highlighted that issue once again. I have examples in my brief which replicate his experience. Those delays caused unnecessary uncertainty for the NHS organisations involved and their patients. I emphasise again that our proposals would address this by integrating the advisory role of the Co-operation and Competition Panel as a distinct identity within Monitor.
The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, spoke of the searing experience of Mid Staffs. Of course, we all recognise that the problems of Mid Staffs must be looked into carefully. That is going on at the moment and I am not able to say too much for obvious reasons. But the problems at Mid Staffs, as she will be aware, predated its becoming a foundation trust. After authorisation, its governors were new and fairly inexperienced. Learning from what happened, I am confident in saying that quality now plays a critical role in the authorisation process for new foundation trusts. The governance of foundation trusts in which they are accountable to representatives of the public and staff should help organisations to listen and act on feedback. The events at Mid Staffs demonstrated the importance of having strong, transparent and accountable governance arrangements for the safe and effective operation of the trust. The changes we are making should provide greater accountability to the public and staff and increased transparency so that they can better challenge and scrutinise the delivery of local healthcare provision.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked what would stop Ministers creating new markets. I hope noble Lords will agree that it must surely be right for doctors and health professionals to want to do the best for their patients. Under this Bill, it would be for commissioners to decide if, when and how to use competition as a means to an end in improving services for patients. The Secretary of State would not have the power to direct commissioners on these matters and the Bill expressly prohibits the Secretary of State exercising his powers to make regulations on commissioning or in setting a mandate to increase market shares for private providers. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones cited the BetterCare and FENIN cases as an example of how NHS commissioners might act as undertakings. As we have previously made clear, the Government’s view is that the NHS Commissioning Board and CCGs will not be undertakings. Unlike in the BetterCare case, neither the board nor the CCGs will be able to provide services. They will only be responsible for commissioning services for the NHS, which will not be an economic activity for the purposes of competition law.
My Lords, I apologise. I expressly said that the concerns were not surrounding commissioning but around provision.
That is helpful. My noble friend and I are clearly in agreement. I apologise if I imputed any different views to him.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, indicated that she felt that the oversight powers for foundation trusts should be retained. As the regulator of all providers of NHS-funded services, Monitor will continue regulating foundation trusts under this Bill. These would be enduring functions, not transitional. I hope the noble Baroness is reassured by that. What would be transitional, however, is Monitor’s power to remove foundation trust boards and board members. That is what Clauses 109 to 112 provide for until 2016, although the Secretary of State would be able to extend the transition period by order, as I indicated earlier, if he or she considered it necessary.
My noble friend Lord Ribeiro sought assurances that all providers will work on a level playing field. I am happy to assure him that all providers will indeed be required to meet the same quality standards for the same procedures. Before being qualified, providers will be required to demonstrate that they can meet those quality standards and Monitor will set fair prices for all providers. Competition, as I have said on previous occasions, will be on quality and not on price. If my noble friend will allow, I shall write to him in some detail with answers to his specific questions, which of course were extremely pertinent. I will copy the letter to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, also said that the Secretary of State should not raid the budgets of successful foundation trusts. I can assure her that this Bill would not enable the Secretary of State to direct individual foundation trusts or to raid foundation trust budgets, which she has rightly cautioned against. She said that there was a need to ensure that the new system should allow care to be shifted out of hospital. I share her view on that. It is essential that the new system enables more care to be shifted out of hospital into people’s homes and communities. This will require strong commissioning, and that is a key point made by the King’s Fund.
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of a foundation trust. It is quite simple for commissioners to be instructed to top-slice, say, 2 per cent of their budget and for the commissioning process to be used to divert money from some foundation trusts to others. What the Minister ignores in his construct of the Bill is the actual practice that is happening in the system at the moment.
The Bill takes us away from what is happening at the moment. That is the point.
My Lords, I do not see how the noble Earl can get away from that. We have recently seen that the Secretary of State, having said that he will not intervene, has made three interventions, twice in relation to PCT behaviour and once in relation to the quality outcomes, and in the last debate the noble Earl said that he would continue to use that mandate in future. It seems to me that we will continue to see these kinds of central interventions. It is as if we were in parallel universes. In one, we have the Bill and the theory. In the other, we have the practical management of the health service. Which is it to be?
Once again, the word “micromanagement” springs to mind. We want to get away from the Secretary of State micromanaging the health service. On the other hand, we think it is perfectly right and proper for the Secretary of State, on behalf of voters, patients and Parliament, to set broad objectives for the NHS, such as the NHS outcomes framework. That document has been very well thought out by clinicians led by Sir Bruce Keogh in the department and has, I believe, commanded universal approval. Surely this is the territory that the Secretary of State should be on: to drive up the quality of care and the performance of the NHS, but not to micromanage.
I recognise that there are fundamental fears that this Bill would increase the role of competition in the NHS and take us down the road to privatisation. I need to be clear that it is not the intention of this Bill, and I do not believe that it is the effect of this Bill, to privatise the NHS. The Bill reaffirms that the NHS will always be there for everyone who needs it, funded from general taxation and free at the point of use. Extending choice and increasing competition is not about privatisation. We want patients to be able to choose to receive their care from the highest-quality providers. Competition in services, where it is introduced, should only be introduced when commissioners genuinely and for good reasons believe that it will benefit patients and the quality of their care. Should we allow this to happen without any check that it is happening legally and properly? Our answer is no; it needs to be overseen fairly and apolitically by a sector-specific regulator with the interests of patients as its core duty.
As with other parts of the Bill, I am more than willing to enter into discussion with noble Lords on Part 3, and I have already indicated that I am sympathetic to some of the key concerns which these amendments raise. With that in mind, I hope that we can move on and debate different issues arising from this part of the Bill and that noble Lords will feel content for the time being not to press the amendments.
The noble Earl said himself that we are clearly in slightly—very—uncharted territory here, and referred of course to the OFT guidance. It is largely a re-run of the 2004 OFT guidance. It is slightly clearer because the case law is slightly more developed, but not a great deal more. We are in the area of assessing risk in terms of the application of EU competition law, domestic competition law and so on. Therefore, in these circumstances, we need the best advice. As I said earlier in my remarks, it is not so much a matter of the department asserting that such-and-such is the case but of having the benefit of some outside, independent legal advice—not that I am promoting the barrister’s profession, being a solicitor. Somebody well versed in competition law should be asked to advise on the risks that I set out at some length earlier today, otherwise we will struggle on with assertion and counter-assertion.
My Lords, my noble friend’s speech earlier in the debate will repay careful study. I intend to be one of those studying it and will certainly take his proposals forward.
My Lords, this has been an absolutely brilliant debate and very helpful to everybody in the Committee; I hope that that includes the Government. I start where the Minister left off about intentions—it is not the Government’s intention to introduce competition red in tooth and claw. However, the Minister must by now have realised that that is not what people understand by what is actually in the Bill and how it might be applied. That is the dilemma that faces the Committee and the Government. We on these Benches will certainly take up the offer that the noble Earl made in his opening statement, which was extremely useful, of discussing how to improve and change this part of the Bill. We would like to be part of that process. There is definitely work to be done on that.
I will briefly sum up our position on this debate. I have a series of questions for the Minister and I am very happy for him to write to me about them. We are not convinced as yet by the idea that having a quango as an economic regulator is the only way to bring a clear and comprehensive legal framework into the Bill. The purpose of Monitor in the Bill is to develop competition, which is why we have the Bill. We believe, and this debate shows us, that the contents of this part of the Bill in fact open the door and invite in the issues that were raised, for instance, by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. If competition is not at the heart of the Bill, why do we need all that detail? The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, made a very helpful intervention and a useful analysis. I, for one, will be rereading his speech about EU competition law.
I ask that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and his colleagues look at our Amendment 262A, which would add a third subsection to Clause 59(1). The proposed paragraph (c) says the provision of health services should be,
“based on the principles of universality and social solidarity”.
We were not making a particularly left-wing statement with that. We were actually lifting it out of European law, which our advice tells us is one of the ways in which you keep at bay the procurement processes of European law. I strongly ask the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, to look at that; I would be interested to hear his comments.
One part of the debate that I have been disturbed about was that raised by the noble Lord, Lord Owen. He also has a freedom of information request in for information that would help to inform the discussions of this House. We know that we have had our debates about the lack of access to the risk register to help us in our deliberations. Indeed, my honourable friends in another place asked if they could also have access to the legal opinions that the department had got on this part of the Bill, and were refused access to that, too. We have all had to find our lawyers to advise us about competition law. We are now all a lot better informed than we were several months ago. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, was right when he said there is no consensus about this; indeed he was right when he said that parts of this Bill are feared and hated. The Minister needs to understand that there is a lot of fear out there, about this part of the Bill in particular. The noble Lord was expressing very grave concerns.
The noble Lord, Lord Newton, made a threat to the Government about patient safety and quality being the order of the day and said that he will be returning to this on Report. He will probably have more effect than the rest of us put together in his interjection on this matter. We will be behind him if he does so, which may not do his reputation any good at all.
The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made a very thoughtful speech, her most important point being that we already have the tools to make the system work. There is no need to put in an economic regulator and the competition regime that this Bill suggests, because the tools are already there. That is very important.
I say to my noble friend Lord Whitty that there is absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of slash and burn to make the point about this part of the Bill. In effect my noble friend was at one with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones.
The message from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, is that the NHS needs to improve. Yes, we would all agree with that and every health system in the world needs to change and improve. I would, however, refer the noble Baroness to my speech, which embraced change, embraced development and even embraced the use of managed competition. Where we part company is that the way to improve the NHS is not to treat it as a utility or a supermarket; we do not think the evidence is there to prove that. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that we should be very wary of the introduction of market forces as a way to improve our health service.
My noble friend Lady Armstrong made the important point that we agree with the Minister that there is a case for the use of competition in its place. The challenge before us is how we ensure that this Bill delivers that without threatening the whole fabric of our health service.
Is the noble Baroness aware of Gaynor et al and the work they have done? I quote again from Protecting and Promoting Patients’ Interests: the Role of Sector Regulation, a research study in 2010:
“We find that the effect of competition is to save lives without raising costs. Patients discharged from hospitals located in markets where competition was more feasible were less likely to die, had shorter length of stay and were treated at the same cost”.
All I would say in answer to the noble Baroness is that there is no known health service in the world that shows competition improves health outcomes. I challenge the noble Baroness to send me the information that shows that is the case.
The noble Baroness should look at this document and at the research which is stated in it.
We are talking about the whole system, not a small part of it. We can share our intelligence outside the Chamber; the noble Baroness makes a good point but there is no evidence that says this is the way to improve our national health system.
Perhaps I can be helpful. The noble Baroness referred to a study of the competition element, which was introduced into the British health system by the previous Government, as far as I am aware. That was carefully circumscribed competition. It did not amount to more than 10 per cent. It was based on the insistence that competition be fair in terms of quality, standards and price; it excluded emergency; and it applied only to elective operations. The difference here is not whether competition is beneficial where appropriate. The real question is: where is it appropriate? That is the distinction between the two comments.
My noble friend comes to my assistance in a very appropriate fashion and puts it much better than I did.
Finally, the question that we need to answer is: does the Bill increase the likely interference of competition law in the National Health Service? Does the Bill transfer power from the Secretary of State to Monitor, and is that a good thing? That is why I was pressing the Minister about who takes the decision about where competition law applies.
The Minister said at the outset that Part 3 is misunderstood. He is absolutely right. If the Government really want to put beyond doubt the issue of competition law and its place in the delivery of our National Health Service, we have to simplify, clarify and delete parts of Part 3 of the Bill. We have to take the NHS out of the danger zone of EU procurement law and competition law. That is the challenge that lies before the House when we return to consider this at a later stage in the Bill.
My Lords, before the noble Baroness sits down, does she accept that European procurement law already applies? I do not think there is any dispute about that. I hope she will welcome my offer to write to cover issues relating to competition law, including giving my view on my noble friend’s suggestion of having an independent legal view. I have not taken a view about that at the moment, but I will gladly consider it.
I accept both the invitation and comments that the Minister has made about procurement law. I refer him back to my comment about opening the door wide and inviting in the lawyers. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 260EA withdrawn.
My Lords, before we move to the next group of amendments, it may be for the convenience of the House if I remind noble Lords that we will interrupt the debate on this group at a convenient moment shortly before 2.30 pm. The House will then resume and, if necessary, adjourn before we take Oral Questions at 2.30 pm.
Amendment 260EB
Moved by
260EB: Clause 58, page 87, line 9, at end insert—
“(d) is to take on the further duties as set out in this Act in relation to authorising through licensing any person who provides health care services for the purposes of the NHS as set out in Chapter 3 of this Act.”
My Lords, I promise that this will be a very much shorter speech. We now turn to the second group, which concerns Monitor’s function as a licensing provider—a part of the suite of amendments that we have put down about reconfiguring Monitor.
The Bill extends the concept of financial regulation to non-financial trusts, and we can see the logic in this. For consistency, however, we argue that all providers of services to the NHS—not just foundation trusts—should have to meet requirements around their financial position and have this subject to oversight, as well as the obvious fit and proper test that they would have to go through.
We can see the argument for a robust evaluation, for example, of capital structures, which certainly would have been helpful in the case of Southern Cross. The regulator should be allowed to make authorisation subject to this kind of probity test—something like a fit and proper persons test. For us, the key aspects of the licensing regime should be determined by the Secretary of State, not by the regulator. The job of the regulator in our view is to operate the system, not to define it. I would invite the Minister to say whether he agrees with that analysis.
With foundation trusts we set out that Monitor shall use the licence to ensure that information flows to the regulator to enable it to have effective oversight and to intervene if necessary. The licence has to extend this to other sorts of providers which may be reluctant to supply information or submit to the idea of intervention. They may claim commercial confidentiality. The Bill resolves this problem, as far as we can see, by simply having no oversight—in other words, the “nothing to do with us, guv” approach to regulation. We believe that the public would not accept this. The Mid Staffs example, where Monitor came into much criticism, or the Southern Cross example might be instructive here.
I am sorry to interrupt. The situation at Mid Staffs arose following the approval of the Department of Health and the Healthcare Commission. It was passed to Monitor as a fit and proper hospital. The scandal emerged only three weeks after it was approved by Monitor.
The point I am making concerns what we need to do for the future. What happened in Mid Staffs has some bearing on that and I said “instructive”.
The tests that we are suggesting should be applied to any organisation wishing to supply clinical services to the NHS around probity and can be enforced through contracts and licensing. Meeting the conditions without trying to argue commercial confidentiality is now the price of doing business with the NHS, in our view.
Finally we have reservations about the interaction between the licensing regime and the use of standard contracts. Why have both as enforcements? What would be appropriate for each? What is the role of Monitor as regards the contracts? What happens to disputes between providers and commissioners? Do they all go to court? What is the role for Monitor in the resolution of disputes? We have accepted that if you have a licensing system then you have to build a bureaucracy to support it, moving from a top-down management bureaucracy to a regulatory bureaucracy. To keep this to a minimum while remaining effective is not simple, as the CQC is finding. But the system set up in the Bill is very complicated and our amendments seek to simplify it. The nature of the operation as to whether it should be a light-touch risk-based approach or continuous direct inspection is another issue which has plagued the CQC and will have to be resolved by the new Monitor. That is a question we need to put on the table.
I now turn to our amendments. In Amendment 260EB Monitor is to take on duties in relation to authorising through licensing any person who provides healthcare services for the purposes of the NHS. Amendment 279A is to remove any potential ambiguity and stress that providers of primary medical services for the purposes of the NHS must hold a licence. Clause 82 stand part is to facilitate a discussion about who can be exempt from the requirement for health service providers to be licensed and who makes those decisions. In Amendment 282A, since this a strong power granted to Monitor to revoke a licence, we add qualifications that in the case of a foundation trust Monitor must consult the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State may veto any revocation if it is deemed not to be in patients’ or taxpayers’ interests. In Amendment 282B the Secretary of State, not Monitor, should determine the principles or framework behind the licensing conditions and Monitor must then have regard to these. Amendment 283 specifies that the standard conditions included in each licence must set out various minimum standards such as for governance arrangements, meeting in public, employment conditions, co-operation with local-authority overview and scrutiny functions. Amendment 283A contains the issue of there being no need to have different standard conditions for different descriptions of licences.
Amendments 286ZA, 287ZA and 287ZB set limits on Monitor’s functions to set and modify the licence conditions, simplifying its role. Amendment 287BA leaves out the roles of Monitor relating to licence conditions, price and charging. Amendment 287F requires licence holders to be fully subject to the overview and scrutiny functions of local authorities. In Amendment 288ZB Monitor has the power to modify the standard conditions applicable to all licences, and in doing so there should be no need for a vote among providers but consultation and consent from the Secretary of State is required. In Clauses 99 and 100 stand part we raise the issue of minimising the bureaucracy surrounding licensing. In Clause 101 stand part we argue that the requirements for fair eligibility and transparency in selection should be covered under the PRCC. This is a probing amendment designed to strengthen the clause instead of deleting it on Report. We think that that should be a matter for discussion. Amendment 288DZA regards Monitor’s power to impose discretionary requirements, including fines, on providers and licence holders if they fail to provide required documents or information, which can only occur with the consent of the Secretary of State. Any fine must be held by the local CCG for reinvestment in services in that area. Amendment 288DA states that if any provider is in breach of a licence Monitor may take action against them, including the imposition of fines, but only with the consent of the Secretary of State. I beg to move.
I would like to address just one of the amendments in this group, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames. Unfortunately my noble friend has been taken ill and is unable to be here. He extends his profound apologies to the Committee.
This amendment is significant in strengthening the general approach towards competition under Section 3 of the Bill, by making it quite plain that the requirements that have to be met, which we will come to in Part 4, must also apply to licence holders. I am in a slight difficulty, as my noble friend Lord Howe will appreciate, as the Government have tabled amendments on aspects of foundations trusts which will arise at a later stage in the Bill, particularly under Clause 161, which are related to the amendment to which I am now speaking. I will therefore do my best to navigate around Clause 161 in so far as I can. However, I may have to make limited reference to it in order to make clear what my own amendment is about. My own amendment is essentially one that would support, and indeed further improve, the proposals put forward in this particular amendment. They should therefore be read together with Clause 161 and Amendments 299ZA and 299AZA in the name of the Government.
We want to make two requirements as a fundamental part of the requirements that licence holders have to meet. We appreciate that, in many ways, the licence-holding requirements are fundamental to the way in which the Bill operates, because it must be the case that providers are brought within the general structure of the Bill itself. Our amendment makes two particular points about that. The first is that the revenue from private patients, as a percentage of the licence holder’s total revenue, must be kept below 50 per cent. Secondly, and at least as importantly, the number of private patients in a foundation trust hospital must also be kept below that proportion.
The main point of this amendment—I think that it is an important one—is again to establish that we are looking at foundation trusts that are part of the provision under the NHS and that a minority of both income and patient numbers would be required for any provision made. We hope, as I think the noble Baroness said, that this set of requirements continues well beyond 2016 as part of the structure of the relationship of foundations trusts to the health services, and that this is therefore not standing alone but a crucial part of the whole strategy.
If the noble Lord, Lord Owen, were in his place, I would say that if this is not the rail track of the French railways, it is at least the rolling stock, and we need both to have an effective railway service. However, I wanted to say one other thing. The first part of the amendment tabled this morning by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, goes a very long way. We will talk about this in more detail later so I shall only sketch it out now, given the time. I think that the first part of the amendment, with regard to income—and indeed the requirement that income must exceed the costs of providing that income, and that it must be used for the purposes of patients within the health services—is a very full and useful advance. It is very close to the phrasing of the 2006 Act, which is a point that I am sure will come across to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and her colleagues, but with the additional wording that makes it, if anything, even stronger.
The noble Earl, Lord Howe, will know from discussions which I and my colleagues have had with him that we would want to see this supplemented, if possible, by a reference to the proportion of patients in foundation trust hospitals. Quite broadly, that is something the public can understand, whereas references to quite complicated percentages of income, although equally important—if not more so—are perhaps less transparent and less apparent.
I will not pursue further the new amendments beyond welcoming them, but I want to advance this particular, although limited, amendment as thoroughly as I can, as I think it would ensure that licence holders were held to the same kind of requirements that we are imposing upon Monitor, the national Commissioning Board and the CCGs. It must be the case that this should be a common approach across the front.
My Lords, I shall be brief. I wish to speak to Amendments 281A and 288ZA, to support my noble friend on Amendment 287EA and to speak to Amendment 287A.
Amendments 281A and 288ZA deal with what are clearly major decisions that will be made by Monitor. The first is the exemption from licensing, which requires notice to be given, and the second deals similarly with the particular standard licence conditions that may be modified. Currently the Bill provides for 28 days’ notice to be given, but these are major issues, and although this is a probing amendment, I hope that the Minister will be able to give a good explanation as to why this period should be so short. Obviously one does not want to have undue delays, but there are quite a number of stakeholders who are bound to be involved in this and it does look rather like a rushed job. So this amendment provides for 90 days to be the standard term for notice to be given.
I move on to Amendment 287A. This amendment simply permits—indeed, requires—the insertion of a standard condition in the licence that the licence holder should,
“abide by the seven general principles of public life set out in the First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life”—
the so-called Nolan principles—and requires,
“the declaration of any financial interest the licence holder may have in a commissioning decision by a clinical commissioning group”.
Nowadays that is increasingly standard. I will not prolong the debate, as we have already had considerable discussion in the course of this Bill about conflicts of interest and the need for transparency in these circumstances. However, I would have thought that licence holders, who essentially will be providers across the whole service, should be under a heavy duty of transparency in order to ensure that they do not have a conflict of interest.
Coming to Amendment 287EA, my noble friend Lady Williams has eloquently set out the issues. What is really required in these circumstances is for the Minister to rebut the presumption that we not only need a provision about the actual total revenue, but also about the number of patients actually treated by a provider. This provision is a belt and braces against the provisions of EU competition law. It is extremely well drafted. I take no credit at all for that, it is my noble friend Lord Marks at work here. We will be discussing the Minister’s very welcome amendment later, but it does not contain the second limb of this particular amendment. It would be useful if the Minister could address this in due course, whether under this group or in the later group, as I recognise the difficulty that my noble friend Lady Williams has also recognised, that this is not grouped with Amendment 299A and probably should be.
My Lords, I have amendments in this group and in light of the previous debate I do not want to repeat anything, except that the Minister stressed the importance of driving up quality and these amendments relate to what should be incorporated in a licence that Monitor gives a provider. Amendment 282ZB is replaced by Amendment 282ZC, which is about being a good employer. If you are going to drive up quality you have to make sure that your staff have education and training and understand research. However, it goes right the way through from every provider at every level, right up to specialist training. It is important that the education and training needs of those who are in the higher professional training bands are also accounted for. Monitor will have to work closely with Health Education England to provide an oversight of the numbers of education and training places available.
The background to this amendment is very compatible with Amendment 278BA tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, who is not in his place but has already spoken to it. The amendment should not have any great implications on the levy and I note that the Government are already committed to undertaking extensive work to establish an appropriate NHS training levy. I suggest, however, that supervision and training of all staff at all levels is essential and I hope the Minister can confirm that licensing will go further than simply, as it states on the face of the Bill at the moment, having regard to education and training.
In Clause 93, Monitor is required to publish draft standards conditions for the licence requirement and Amendment 285ZA, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hollins, requires somebody to state what primary medical services are to do. If Monitor is not to do it, I respectfully ask the Minister who is. What is to be their availability? How will they work with pre- and post-hospital care? A reappraisal and revalidation will look at clinical standards but there are real difficulties if more goes out into the community. Who is going to see patients with complex conditions at home, how are the deficits in out-of-hours care to be driven up and who is responsible for what? It also requires a duty of collaboration, because if you do less in the hospital sector you need to increase your collaboration, not decrease it.
We have already debated the importance of staff being involved at local and national level to work for the benefit of the wider NHS. As background to this amendment, may I give a short example of why integration between primary and secondary care and social care is absolutely essential? Take a child who the nursery, perhaps, reports is behaving oddly. The general practitioner refers the child to paediatrics, they consult their developmental colleagues—speech and language therapists and psychologists—and an overall conclusion is that this child is neglected but also has some pathology, such as glue ear and delayed speech. The child comes from a home in which there are no books and no one is talking to him or her. For the GP and all other services to link there must be integrating care; that is why it is stressed in the context of this amendment.
The last amendment in this group in my name is Amendment 287AA, which relates to indemnity. Currently foundation trusts carry vicarious liability for clinical care provided by their staff and therefore need to cover claims arising from this work. The trust can seek a source of indemnity from providers other than the NHS Litigation Authority but does not have to and does not have to publish whether or not it does.
The Medical Defence Union has already questioned the indemnity of any qualified provider with the Department of Health and had a response outlining that the NHS standard contract requires providers to have indemnity with a specific requirement set by local commissioners. The levels would vary according to the circumstances of different providers. But that response misses the point. I am not suggesting that the Bill should set the level of indemnity, but we should ensure that all providers of care to NHS patients have indemnity in place so that patients do not go uncompensated. The indemnity should be adequate and appropriate and this cannot be done under separate rules or regulations. The concern is that if a contractor goes out of business for whatever reason and does not have appropriate ongoing indemnity, there will be no course of redress for patients who have been harmed by that individual contractor.
There is a real prospect that patients who are severely or negligently damaged by an individual who does not carry adequate indemnity would then be completely unable to gain compensation because the way that the Bill is written does not require there to be adequate indemnity for the service provided. The long-term nature of clinical indemnity claims means that the level of indemnity must be adequate to provide compensation, sometimes many years into the future when a claim is settled or because sometimes the harm done does not emerge for some years. An indemnity, therefore, has to be in place when a provider is no longer in existence.
I will not elaborate any further on this because it is a discussion I would be interested in having with the Minister outside the Chamber and I am aware that we are time-restricted for this group of amendments, but I hope that the Minister will be able to consider the importance of indemnity for those providers that contracts are placed with and even for those they may sub-contract to.
House resumed.
Sitting suspended.
Police: Officer Numbers
Question
Asked By
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many police officers are currently employed by police forces in England and Wales and how many were employed in May 2010.
My Lords, police personnel data are collected on a financial year cycle. Published statistics show that there were 139,110 full-time equivalent police officers in England and Wales as at 31 March 2011. This compares with 143,734 as at March 2010.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. He will be aware that police authority grants for the next financial year show a £700 million cut in real terms, which is part of the 20 per cent cut front-loaded over a four-year period. How can the Government continue to claim that these cuts are not having an impact on front-line policing when the latest statistics show a worrying rise in crime? What does the noble Lord have to say about that?
My Lords, first, I remind the noble Lord that we have a deficit and that must be tackled by seeking better value for money from every public service. That includes the police. There is no need for the noble Lord to make signs of that sort.
I accept that there has been a decline in police numbers, but there is no need to get fixated on this. At the same time, we have seen over the period that I mentioned—March 2010 to March 2011—a decline in recorded crime of 4 per cent.
My Lords, will the Minister tell us the cost of appointing police and crime commissioners and how many front-line officers that would represent?
My Lords, I have always accepted that there is a cost to appointing police and crime commissioners, but we believe they will bring accountability. Accountability will be good for that service, and we will get even better value for money.
Does the noble Lord think it is good value for money if the crime rate is going up?
I have just quoted the figures relating to the period that I cited in the original Answer, which showed that recorded crime is going down.
What progress is my noble friend making with cutting down on the amount of bureaucracy that the police have to get involved in—form filling and so forth—rather than getting out on the streets and deterring crime?
I am very grateful to my noble friend for raising the question of bureaucracy. That is what my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has done in announcing a package of policies that will cut police red tape, saving some 3.3 million police hours per year. That is the equivalent of some 1,500 police posts.
My Lords, will the noble Lord answer yes to my question as to whether he will look at the pathetically low number of not only police officers but all emergency service workers who have been vaccinated against things such as smallpox and anthrax when the Olympic Games next year will clearly give us a dangerous situation so far as potential biological attacks are concerned?
I hope I will be able to answer yes to my noble friend in due course. I will have to look at those figures, but I am unsighted on them at the moment. If my noble friend is prepared to accept it, I will write to him in due course.
My Lords, when I asked the noble Lord’s predecessor but one about the retiring of more senior police officers and how this would have an adverse impact on people such as the terrorism support officers, I was told that a central register would be kept of how many were going, so that it did not have a disproportionate effect if they were taken from each police area. Where do we stand on that now? Has it had a disproportionate effect or are we managing to keep a balance across all the police areas?
My Lords, again, I am somewhat embarrassed in that I cannot answer the noble Lord’s precise question. I will certainly look at that, but I have not been made aware of any problems in that area. If I have not been made aware of them, I suspect that there is not a problem in that field. If I am wrong, of course I will let the noble Lord know.
My Lords, the Minister will recognise that police forces across the country have been very successful in developing specialist child protection teams. In the current financial situation, some of these teams are extremely vulnerable. Can the noble Lord assure the House that he will use his good offices to protect these highly specialised and very important teams?
The noble Lord is right to draw attention to the specialist work done by individual police forces. It is obviously a matter for each individual police force and the police authority to decide on the appropriate priorities. Certainly within the Home Office, we would want to encourage them to continue with that work.
My Lords, I apologise to the House for missing the start of the Question. I had forgotten that Prayers were earlier today.
Police officers tend to retire at a relatively early age. For their own satisfaction, as well as thinking of the public purse, can the Minister say anything about continuing to make use of their expertise and experience, which is the product of both years and public investment?
My Lords, obviously the training of an individual policeman is a very expensive process. We want to get maximum use of all policemen for as long as possible. Your Lordships will have noticed that some of the policemen who operate around this House tend to be at the older end of the spectrum. We are grateful for their expertise in providing protection for this House. Perhaps, as my noble friend Lord McNally implies from a sedentary position, they all look rather young to us. However, we do want to get as much use as possible out of all those policemen who have trained at such considerable public expense.
Can my noble friend advise how long the delay is in the present climate for an officer passing all the hurdles and being promoted to sergeant? How long does that person have to wait before he achieves that rank?
My Lords, I am facing a lot of difficult and technical questions, which I have to say I cannot answer in the manner in which I would want. I am grateful to my noble friend for putting that question, but I will have to write to him with an answer.
My Lords, there has been considerable effort made to recruit police officers from the black and ethnic minority communities. Can my noble friend indicate whether there has been any problem in retaining such officers and any reasons for that?
My Lords, as my noble friend has made clear, considerable efforts have been made to increase the diversity of the police force. All police forces have made considerable gains there. I am not aware of any problems of retention, but if my noble friend has any evidence of that, I would be grateful to hear from him. That would then obviously be a matter that we would have to address.
Adoption
Question
Asked By
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are taking to speed up the adoption process.
My Lords, the Munro review and the Family Justice Review will help us to build the capacity of the social work profession and speed up the family justice system. The Government have appointed Martin Narey as ministerial adviser and established a ministerial advisory group. We have issued revised statutory guidance on adoption. To improve transparency, we have also published data on the performance of local authorities. We are committed to speeding up the adoption process, and will take further steps, as necessary, to do so.
I welcome the Government’s efforts to improve the life chances of our most vulnerable children, but does the Minister share my concern that adoption of children with more complex needs—often older children, those who have suffered abuse or neglect—is often delayed because the Government will not provide funding for post-adoption services? Instead, we say to adopters, “You pick up the pieces. You look after a difficult child no one else will take and you pay for their specialist medical health requirements”. Will the Government and the Minister review that funding policy so that we give our most vulnerable children the chance of a loving home?
I agree with the noble Baroness about the importance of trying to address the problem of how one finds places for older children. In particular, there are a number of groups—disabled children, sibling groups and older children—which, as the noble Baroness will know much better than me, suffer from those problems. I will certainly relay the points that she has made to my honourable friend Mr Loughton. I know that he is delighted that the noble Baroness has kindly agreed to serve on the ministerial advisory group. He is very grateful, and I am sure that he will pursue those points with her as part of that.
My Lords, at Barnardo’s, of which I am vice-president, we have found that children who are adopted are more likely to have entered care because of abuse and neglect; 72 per cent of children who were adopted enter care for this reason. Because of the damage that they have endured, they need access to age-appropriate emotional and mental health services. Can my noble friend the Minister tell the House what steps the Government are taking to improve the capacity of the care system to support children and young people who have suffered neglect and abuse?
Again, I think that this is an important point. Across the piece, we are trying to take a number of different measures to address some of these issues, whether it is speeding up the adoption process, trying to raise the quality of the social work workforce or working with charities and other voluntary organisations such as Barnardo’s. There are a number of ways in which we have to work. The Government have made a priority of tackling this problem and we will continue to come forward with proposals as to how we might best achieve that.
My Lords, a two-and-a-half-year average delay in the adoption of a child at this very vulnerable age is devastating for that child and may have disastrous consequences. Although some delay may be necessary in order to make a proper assessment of the suitability of adoptive parents, can anything be done to reduce the rather long delays in the judicial processes? Can we also do something about removing the unhelpful barriers to white parents adopting black children? There is a rather large number of black children who are hanging around waiting and we should not be putting up barriers.
The noble Lord is absolutely right that black children have particular problems in finding adoptive parents and that the results for them, in terms of finding adoptive parents, are far worse. Their chances are half as good as they are for other children, and that is clearly a problem. We have sought to make it clear that the colour of someone’s skin should not be a bar to them adopting. If one can find parents where all sorts of things all fit into place that might be better for the child, but the most important thing is a loving parent. In terms of delays in the court process, the Family Justice Review looked at that and has come up with recommendations that we should aim to spend no more than six months on the court side of the process. That would address the problem that the noble Lord has rightly identified.
My Lords, desirable though it is that a Government should prudently plan and estimate the number of appropriate adoptions in England and Wales in a year, and appropriate though it be that every effort should be made to ensure that there is an available stock of would-be adopters, does the Minister nevertheless agree that adoption is an order of the court of such crucial importance that it should only be made in the light of the specific facts of that particular case, bearing in mind the interests of the child and taking into account the whole of its life?
The noble Lord is exactly right: one wants to adopt a balanced approach to adoption. The fact is that the number of children being adopted has unfortunately been falling. Of around 3,000 children in care under the age of one last year, only 60 were placed in adoption. There are things that we ought to do to redress the balance, but the noble Lord’s underlying point is clearly important.
My Lords, the Government’s proposals will remove legal aid entirely from some 35,000 families a year who are in court for one reason or another concerning their children. Are the Government not concerned that without legal representation there will be severe delays in the hearing of these care cases, including children for whom the plan is adoption, adding further to the delay for these children?
My Lords, CAFCASS has an extremely important role to play in giving support through the legal process to the families and the children who are going through this process, and that support through CAFCASS remains in place.
My Lords, does the Minister have any information about the consequences in terms of the number of children adopted following the closure of children’s adoption agencies consequential to the sexual orientation regulations?
My Lords, I am aware of the number of Catholic adoption agencies that have had to reorganise to carry on performing their important role. I would be the first to recognise that the Catholic adoption agencies, in particular where disabled children are concerned, have a very proud and long record. However, very few of them have had to reconstitute themselves to comply with those regulations—I believe it is actually only one. I know that there were concerns about that, and I am glad to say that the vast majority have managed to accommodate the regulations and to carry on with the important services that they provide.
Health: Cancer
Question
Asked By
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they will take in response to the findings of Professor Colin Pritchard’s study published recently in the British Journal of Cancer.
My Lords, this study concerns mortality. We have a good track record on reducing cancer mortality. However, because mortality rates are linked to incidence rates, mortality on its own is not a useful measurement of NHS performance. Survival rates are much more effective as they show how good the NHS is at diagnosing and treating people with cancer. We know that our cancer survival rates lag behind the best performing countries, and our ambition is to improve survival rates and save 5,000 additional lives per year by 2014-15.
My Lords, I recognise what the noble Baroness says about survival rates, but does she agree that the report demonstrates that in the past 10 years cancer services in the UK have improved dramatically? While England and Wales spend less on health than most other countries—9.3 per cent of GDP compared with 10.7 per cent in Germany and 15 per cent in the USA—they achieved the biggest overall annual fall in cancer deaths, and cancer deaths are important to people in this country as well as cancer survival rates.
The noble Baroness is right; there has been that decline. Of course mortality is extremely important, but you have to look at incidence, survival and mortality together. She will also be aware that much of that decrease in mortality is because of the decrease in men smoking. Men took up smoking in larger numbers than did women. The numbers of men smoking started to decline in the 1950s, and that has had an effect on the decline in the number of cancer deaths.
My Lords, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, accounting for about 5 per cent of all cancer deaths. A recent report by Pancreatic Cancer UK found that survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients in the UK—only 3 per cent are expected to live for five years or more—are worse than in most comparable countries and have not improved in 40 years. What assurances can the Minister give that the NHS will continue to work to improve results in all forms of cancer and that pancreatic cancer sufferers will not just be written off as a lost cause?
Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult cancer to diagnose. As the noble Lord knows, when it is picked up it is often very advanced and survival rates are very poor indeed. The Government are well aware of the problems here. My honourable friend Paul Burstow in the other place is meeting Pancreatic Cancer UK shortly. I hope that the noble Lord will feed into that. If he has an association with that organisation, can he put his questions to it so that they can be fed to Paul Burstow, or alternatively to me?
My Lords, is it not a fact that the great improvement in cancer treatment is due to early detection? It is important to keep people trained in that, particularly for the rare cancers that I am always talking about. Do the Government not feel that we owe a great deal to the cancer and research charities that are continuing to do very useful work in alerting people to the need for early detection?
My noble friend is absolutely right. We owe a huge amount to the organisations in the United Kingdom, not least Cancer Research UK, which is a major player internationally. She is also right about early diagnosis. That is how you start to bring deaths down; you make sure that you diagnose early enough so that you can intervene in a way that is going to be much more effective. Noble Lords might like to know that there will be a first ever national cancer campaign on bowel cancer to flag up the symptoms to people in the hope that they seek diagnosis at a much earlier stage, because if it is caught early it is completely curable.
My Lords, the complex paper by Professor Pritchard also looks at the costs of delivering cancer care. One of the points made very clearly in that paper is that the cost of drugs delivered under the NHS is considerably less. We pay far less for the excellent results that we get than Germany, Spain, Italy and France do—as much as 40 per cent less, in some cases. Given that, and given that independent assessments of the health service show that the British health service has some of the best value for money in the world, why did the Prime Minister say that we cannot go on as we are and introduce the current Health and Social Care Bill?
I fully agree that the National Health Service is very cost-effective and that it has been an extraordinary service. However, we have many challenges coming down the track, as the noble Lord will be acutely aware—not least our ageing population, which needs to be supported, particularly at home and in the community where appropriate, and not immediately taken into hospitals, where interventionist care may not be in the best interests of those patients. Therefore it is extremely important that there is more clinical judgment on the best interests of each patient and how these things are organised, and that they are not simply driven forward by the way in which provision is organised at the moment, which is very much focused on secondary institutions.
My Lords, the biggest cause of cancer deaths in the country is still lung cancer. It kills more people every year than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined, yet lung cancer attracts only 5 per cent of cancer research funding. The Minister has said that this is unsatisfactory and thinks that it is largely due to the lack of first-class research proposals. Does the Minister agree with me that we should not let this situation continue, with the biggest killer getting the least research? Will the Minister consider urgently sponsoring a meeting of all interested parties to see how we might intervene to generate many more fundable first-class cancer research proposals?
My noble friend raised this with my other noble friend Lord Howe, who has taken a slight break in the health Bill at the moment. I was struck by his answer, which was on the paucity of cancer research funding for lung cancer. I therefore have more information for my noble friend, which is that the amount spent on lung cancer between 2006 and 2010 in fact doubled in comparison with a 28 per cent increase for overall cancer research spending. The National Institute for Health Research, for example, is currently hosting 62 studies on lung cancer that are being set up or are just beginning to recruit patients. I hope, therefore, that my noble friend will be encouraged that there appears to be a shift. However, if my noble friend would like to write to my other noble friend the Minister with detail about the meeting that he would like, the Minister would be delighted to receive that letter.
Loan Companies: Interest Rates
Question
Asked By
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to take action to cap the interest rate charged by finance companies offering payday loans.
My Lords, there are real concerns about these loans, but capping interest rates is not necessarily the solution as it could reduce access to licensed credit and force some consumers into the arms of illegal loan sharks. We have commissioned research to look at the impact of capping the total cost of credit that these lenders can charge. We are having discussions with the industry on ensuring that existing codes of practice contain real enhanced consumer protections to address concerns that blight this market.
I thank the Minister for that reply. Some 3.5 million people in this country use payday loans. Yesterday I decided to become one of them. I applied for a loan for £300 over a 21-day period. I went on a very friendly website and filled out all the forms very quickly. It told me that if I clicked the button, I would have £300 in my bank account in 15 minutes. I had to repay, in three weeks, the sum of £369, which is an annualised interest rate of 4,200 per cent. I did not click the website. Will the Minister say whether the Government plan to regulate this industry? There are a lot of very desperate, vulnerable and gullible people out there, and I think that they need help.
I thank the noble Lord for his personal intervention on this question. No doubt consumers should not be swayed by promises that they will have the money in their banks in minutes. This may well be true, but before taking out one of these loans they should stop and think. Most people handle payday loans very well—we are rather good at handling credit in this country—but at the moment we are going through tough times and more people are borrowing fast, quickly and just for a couple of days. Of course, we all know that APR is annualised up and therefore most people pay about £50 or £60 for the couple of days that they need the money. Without doubt, there are concerns around payday loans such as rolling over old loans into new, businesses using continuous-payment authority to take money out of people’s bank accounts when they are not expecting it and a real lack of transparency about how these loans work, as the noble Lord has just shown. We have started discussions with the industry on ensuring that its existing codes are working and being enforced, and we are now looking at the total cost of credit. Bristol University’s Personal Finance Research Centre is to carry out research to identify the impact on consumers and businesses of introducing a cap on the total cost of credit, as referred to by the noble Lord.
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the most important part about any new code is that it makes it absolutely clear to the borrower from the start how much the loan is going to cost and what other consequences might arise from late payment?
My noble friend was not only the Minister for Consumer Affairs but the chairman of the National Consumer Council for some years, so if she speaks on this subject we know that she speaks with authority. She is absolutely right; to be an informed consumer is the most important gift that we can give to people when they make purchases or take out a loan. We have started discussions with the industry to check that people are giving out the right information, and in April next year we will move free advice to the Money Advice Service, which will be co-ordinating debt advice across the country.
My Lords, in light of the reductions in welfare benefits coming down the road, are there any plans to address the critical period of debt and introduce effective regulations that will require advertisements in the windows of these money shops to say exactly what a loan will cost? For example, if you borrow £100 for a month it will cost you £X. That sort of information would immediately alert people to the risks that they are running. We cannot afford to wait for commissions of inquiry and academic research about something that, as the noble Baroness has said, is a long-standing problem.
The Office of Fair Trading is always vigilant and always has its eyes on this to make sure that the information is out there. That is a particularly good piece of advice, however. I will see whether this is being done and, if not, what we can do to take it forward.
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness when she says that we need informed consumers, but will she agree that for a Government to say that people should stop and think before they take these loans demonstrates that someone is out of touch? These people are desperate and poor and they have nowhere else to go, which is why they need good regulation and assistance.
After six years as chairman of the National Consumer Council and seven years as the president of the Trading Standards Institute, I am sorry if I gave the impression that I take it casually that people should get into trouble in this way. I apologise if that is the impression that I gave. There is no doubt that the biggest worry in all this is that capping, or any other similar action that we take, will lead to the poorest and most vulnerable people having to go to illegal moneylenders, where the punishment if they do not pay is not always visible. All the time that they can borrow money legally—no matter how high the interest, no matter how wrong the way in which they are borrowing it is—we can at least be there to help them out of the trouble they get into.
Devolution (Time) Bill [HL]
Third Reading
Bill passed and sent to the Commons.
Health and Social Care Bill
Committee (12th Day) (Continued)
Clause 58 : Monitor
Debate on Amendment 260EB resumed.
My Lords, I appreciate that this procedure is not common, but it is not novel. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, is seeking to contribute to the continued debate. May I suggest that Peers who are attempting to leave should do so by the other door, and preferably not by that door—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Borrie—so that she can stand and be heard by the House?
Thank you very much indeed. I just want to comment briefly on the amendments on licensing. Some of them are asking quite a lot of the licensing procedure, but there may be other mechanisms that achieve what they want to achieve. I am sympathetic to people’s desire to add these conditions, but I think that it is important to see the licensing arrangements as part of the system, in conjunction with registration with the CQC. It enables Monitor to approve the compliance arrangements to achieve good governance and the information requirements needed to monitor that the organisations are delivering the right standard of care.
The threat of licence revocation enables Monitor to pick up at an early stage the problems of quality and finance which other people have spoken about. Obviously the providers will be very concerned to hold on to their licence, which seems to be a very powerful and potent tying-in of organisations to the ethos and objectives of the NHS. We must be very careful not to regard the licensing process as something within which to impose too many conditions, but as a basic framework that ties the licensees into the system. That is particularly important when organisations start to go wrong. We will discuss later how they are rescued from those predicaments. However, it seems to me that this creates a basic level playing field, and that it would be a mistake to use that process to do much more than tie everyone into the basic system. It sort of replaces the old authorisation process on compliance and quality that was operated by old Monitor, but it is a way of going forward as new organisations come into the NHS as providers of NHS services. I just wanted to add those comments because I think that these amendments might be adding a bit too much to the responsibilities of the licensee.
My Lords, licence conditions will be the mechanism through which Monitor will be able to prevent potentially anti-competitive behaviour and enable service integration, where this is what commissioners want. Monitor would also use licence conditions to collect the information it would need to set prices, and to help identify at an early stage—at an early stage—if a provider was at risk of financial distress. If that was the case, it could work with the provider to address potential problems, as well as supporting commissioners to ensure continuity of services. I completely understand the concerns in that area.
First, I think that I need to make clear that all providers of NHS healthcare services will be subject to the requirement to hold a licence. This includes providers of primary medical services, which is the question posed in Amendment 279A. Furthermore, where a provider is providing services that carry a requirement to be registered with the Care Quality Commission, that registration will be a prerequisite to being granted a licence by Monitor. We all want to see close operational links between Monitor and the CQC. The Bill emphasises this by placing duties of co-operation on both organisations, not just in matters such as information sharing, but also in the development of the joint application mechanism for providers seeking registration from both bodies.
We are also clear that regulation must be proportionate, and impose the minimum of additional burdens on those being regulated, while still safeguarding the interests of patients and the public. To that end, the Bill makes provision for the Secretary of State to make regulations establishing an exemptions regime, so that licensing can be targeted towards those parts of the health service where there is the greatest need for regulation. While we are clear that there must be an exemptions regime, we also recognise the importance of making sure that we get the scope of it right. To that end, we are already committed to consulting fully next year on our proposals for the exemptions regulations. Noble Lords may also be aware that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of your Lordships’ House has recommended that the first set of exemption regulations should be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure. We agree, and both Houses will have the opportunity to debate them before they come into force.
The Bill provides for Monitor to attach conditions to licences. While the Bill sets a framework for the scope of those conditions in Clauses 95 to 97, we are clear that it will be for Monitor itself to develop the detail as the sector regulator. The intention is that the conditions will support Monitor in exercising its functions and that Monitor will be best placed to know how they should be framed to achieve that. Therefore, including large numbers of mandatory conditions on the face of the Bill, as some noble Lords have suggested in certain amendments—for example, Amendments 283, 285ZA and 287A—would undermine the Monitor’s independence, which we do not think is desirable if it is to be a robust and vigorous sector regulator.
Nevertheless, I would like to reassure the Committee that there will be proper oversight of Monitor’s proposals for conditions. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State will have the power to veto the first set of licence conditions. We are clear that Monitor must be able to operate freely and autonomously within the legislative framework established by the Bill. We have built in reasonable checks and balances through requirements for key products, such as the licensing criteria and conditions, to be subject to approval by the Secretary of State. Although I understand entirely the reasoning behind amendments tabled by noble Lords which would increase the level of the Secretary of State’s involvement in provider regulation—for example, Amendments 281A, 282A and 282B—regrettably, I feel that these go a step too far in limiting Monitor’s independence.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked me quite a number of questions to which I feel I should write in response. In particular, however, she asked whether Monitor will have the role of resolving disputes and whether all disputes would go to court. The answer to both of those questions is no. The NHS standard contract already provides for contractual disputes to be resolved through arbitration and this will not change. Licence holders have to agree special conditions or modifications to conditions. If the provider disagrees and Monitor then wants to proceed, it must refer the matter to the Competition Commission for consideration.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones spoke to Amendment 281A. I want just to comment briefly on that. The amendment would increase the minimum length of notice period during which representations could be made following publication of a notice of proposed exemptions. I am grateful to my noble friend for that. The Bill is clear that the notice period should be not less than 28 days. It could therefore be much more than that, and our expectation in most cases is that it will be. But there will be times when the Secretary of State needs to act quickly, so being locked into a notice period of not less than 90 days could be detrimental to a particular provider or group of providers.
My noble friend Lady Williams spoke to two amendments, Amendments 287EA and 287EB, where the purpose is to ensure that licence conditions on providers of NHS services restrict the income they can earn from private patients and the number of private patients they treat, as well as that funds provided for NHS care are not used to subsidise private treatment offered by foundation trusts, with various conditions attached. I understand my noble friend’s concern about this. However, the amendments would be impractical, and in particular for licence holders who are not NHS bodies they would be highly undesirable. Foundation trusts’ principal purpose—we will come to this in a later group of amendments, when we discuss the private patient income cap—is to provide goods and services for the NHS in England. It means that they must earn most of their income, over 50 per cent, from NHS services. We are tabling a government amendment to make it clear that the majority of every foundation trust’s income will continue to be from NHS service provision. Foundation trusts must comply with their principal purpose or they will be breaking the law. They could be at risk of successful legal challenge if they fail to meet their principal purpose. We are tabling a second government amendment to require foundation trusts to show in their annual reports how income earned from private activities has impacted on the provision of NHS services. Using NHS income to subsidise private patient work would lead to foundation trusts breaching the NHS constitution. The Government also gave a commitment that foundation trusts will have to produce separate accounts for their NHS and private-funded work.
Finally, I want to mention briefly the amendments that will fall to me to move in relation to licensing: Amendments 280A, 281B, 284A to 284C, 285A, 286B, 287C and 287D, and 288A to 288F. These are without exception minor tidying-up amendments to improve the drafting or clarify meaning, and I hope that the Committee will accept them when they are moved. I hope, too, that the Committee feels reassured by my explanation of how we envisage licensing to operate and that the noble Baroness will be able to withdraw her amendment.
My Lords, can the Minister provide clarification on the questions I asked? First, who is going to define what is expected of primary care services in terms of how they are integrated? If that does not form part of their licensing, who will define the minimum standard across the country? Secondly, in Amendment 282ZC I set out that:
“A criterion for a person or organisation to be granted a licence must be that that person or organisation demonstrates a commitment to education, training and research”.
I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the situation when someone may well be good enough to provide clinical services but shows absolutely no commitment to any aspect of education and training, even for the development of their own staff, or to any of the research developments that might be happening in their field. I would include in this physiotherapy and occupational therapy assistance, such as people putting appliances into homes and those providing supportive care-assistance services in health, but not the secondary and tertiary-care specialised services which are covered very adequately by all the criteria from the royal colleges. It is about the minimum standard.
My third question relates to indemnity: do the Government feel that it is acceptable for a provider to be licensed without having to demonstrate that it has adequate indemnity?
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness if I skirted over the considerable number of questions she asked, and if it would be helpful to her I will write her a letter on all of them. Perhaps I may cover two at this point. As regards her Amendment 282ZC, our expectation is that Monitor’s licensing criteria will be light-touch and broadly drawn, to encompass a wide range of providers. The amendment she has tabled does not lend itself to that approach. Much as I understand the importance of this particular issue, requiring any and every licence applicant to meet a definition of,
“commitment to education, training and research”,
that Monitor has developed does not fit with the principles of proportionate and targeted regulation. But I will write to her with further reasoning on that.
As regards the noble Baroness’s Amendment 282ZB, which is about indemnity, if she will forgive me, again I think that I will have to write to her.
I have another amendment on which the Minister might find a lacuna—Amendment 287A, which deals with the Nolan principles.
Will my noble friend allow me to write to him on that?
I assumed that he would make that undertaking.
I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, asked that, because I was waiting to hear what the answer would be. I look forward to the noble Earl’s response. I fear that the noble Earl will be spending the whole of the weekend writing letters to all of us about these matters.
I am not going to say very much about this. This has been a divided debate, but many of the questions asked have been similar. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was quite right to raise the issue of requirements. She and her noble friend Lord Clement-Jones were right to raise the issue of transparency, which is very important here.
I am not sure that we on these Benches would agree that the checks and balances are the right ones. At this stage, we will wait for the letters from the noble Earl. I will also read his remarks again in Hansard. We may return to discuss this matter again. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 260EB withdrawn.
Clause 58 agreed.
Schedule 8 : Monitor
Amendment 260EC
Moved by
260EC: Schedule 8, page 361, line 15, at end insert—
“( ) The chair and the chief executive must be separate roles, and cannot be held by the same person.”
We turn now to the very important matter of Monitor and accountability. I see that many noble Lords have amendments in this group, many of them echoing each other. The reason for that is that, given the powerful role that Monitor is to have—whether it will have this role under the regime proposed by the Minister or the alternative architecture proposed by myself earlier today—we think that accountability is very important indeed.
We propose two improvements to Monitor’s governance. We believe that its functions should be exercised in the public interest and therefore that it should meet in public, as the NHS Commissioning Board will. We should also no longer have a combined chair and chief executive post. I hardly need say to the House that this arrangement is totally against established good practice in the public or private sector. I rest that issue there and look forward to the noble Earl’s response.
When foundation trusts were set up, the idea was that they could earn freedoms from traditional NHS management and also bring an element of democratic accountability and community ownership. It must be said that much of this has not materialised. Some foundation trusts up north have made an effort to engage locally with the people they serve. Some have adopted a business model rather than a community ownership model. I am sure that all noble Lords are members of their foundation trusts—I hope that they are and that they take part when asked to do so. The target to push up membership numbers in the trusts seems to have been forgotten.
Being successful in becoming a foundation trust shows that a fairly high barrier was overcome but that represents only the position at one point in time. As with the share market, things can go up or down. Some big-name foundation trusts have had their bad patches. A few, surprising names have been at the edge of intervention. If you compare the list of foundation trusts flagged as being in difficulty by Monitor with the list of ratings from Dr Foster or, in its time, the ratings from the Healthcare Commission, there seems to be no pattern at all. Indeed, a double-excellent foundation trust came close to de-authorisation.
Every large, complex organisation can get into trouble. Past success is no guarantee of future performance nor is it necessarily even a good predictor. That is why we argue that the oversight of foundation trusts by Monitor should continue and its intervention powers should remain. We have long argued for shifting the balance of power and we fully support the idea of earned autonomy with the regulator as an independent judge. But if it is earned it can also be taken back. We shall see what transpires when one foundation trust is obviously unable to present a viable business plan. What will happen to its future?
Monitor has to continue in the role we gave it as the authoriser of foundation trusts as they earn their limited independence. In recent times, it toned down the role it took as the promoter of foundation trusts and as a trade body as a step too far. We argue that Monitor as a regulator should be neutral not a cheerleader. We can accept the principle that it is wrong to favour any type of organisation for arbitrary or political reasons, as is set out in the operating framework. We do not accept the convoluted and ultimately meaningless formulation contained in the Bill. Monitor should retain its intervention powers. We accept the case for autonomy and community ownership but in the final analysis we see foundation trusts as still part of the NHS and so, in the end, subject to the powers of the Secretary of State.
We accept that the governors should be a strong element in foundation trust governance but, as the Bill accepts, they need support and development in that role. Most foundation trusts will say that governor effectiveness takes at least five years but governors, no matter how effective under normal circumstances, may be completely ineffective in times of overwhelming crisis. It is then that the Secretary of State must have the power to intervene to ensure the overall functioning of the NHS and to protect the interests of patients and their communities. A major change here is that the Bill extends the concept of financial regulation to non-foundation trust providers—that is, the private sector. As I have said before, we can see the logic in that.
I am going to skip ahead and do what I said earlier in the Bill: you do every other page of your brief and see whether anybody notices. We have already had a lot of debates about these issues.
Finally, we come to reservations about the interaction between the licensing regime and the use of standard contracts. Actually, we have also discussed that so I will not ask those questions again. We have recently seen missives from the Department of Health and from Monitor exploring the ideas around regulation. It is slightly amazing that these are all coming out now, as helpful as they may be. The general idea, as we have said before about the Bill, is that you should consult on the legislation, allow Parliament its scrutiny role and then implement it. However, as we know, the Bill exhibits the principle of reverse engineering. When its progress was paused to allow consultation, the Government continued to roll out the implementation and the Bill is catching up with that now. We scrutinise the Bill alongside its implementation and the secondary legislation is written up in the form of documents coming out of the Department of Health.
I turn to our amendments in this group. Amendment 260EC provides that the chair and chief executive of Monitor cannot be the same person, Amendment 260GA provides that Monitor must meet in public and Amendment 267D would apply the mandate to Monitor. We think that Amendment 267D might be improved on and might even be better located in Clause 20 on the mandate itself, but the point of it is to raise the idea that the Secretary of State may be given a greater power of direction of Monitor and ultimately boost its accountability. I beg to move.
My Lords, I would like to continue the train of thought started by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about the specifics relating to Monitor. I shall speak to Amendments 260F, 260G, 260H, 269A, 294BA, 294BB and 294BC.
First, I may not have got Amendments 260F and 260G, relating to the first chief executive of Monitor, completely right, because Monitor is already in existence, but in principle the chief executive of Monitor should surely be appointed by the Secretary of State in the same way in which the chairman and chief executive of the national Commissioning Board are. As we go through this debate, it will become increasingly obvious that Monitor’s role is as important as that of the NHS Commissioning Board, so I would have thought that having an appointments system on all fours with the board would be imperative. Then again, we come to the question of the provision of information to the Secretary of State. Amendment 260H mirrors the powers possessed by the Secretary of State in relation to the NHS Commissioning Board. It seems sensible that that should be in place as well.
Harking back to our debate on competition and the application of EU competition law, we come on to a rather different issue. This is an interesting place for these amendments to be put. In Clause 118 it is the Competition Commission that deals with the determination of methods of setting prices under the national tariff if there is a disagreement—the Competition Commission has that referred to it by Monitor. For all the reasons that we explored in the debate on the first set of amendments today, it is inappropriate, in my view and in the view of many others, for the Competition Commission to be so heavily involved in matters relating to the NHS. Substituting the Secretary of State for the commission seems to be sensible.
The objection is sometimes raised that we need an independent body in order to set the method. That is a fair point but it is an objection to the Secretary of State doing this entirely on his own, whereas an independent panel appointed by the Secretary of State could do the job equally well. That would ensure that there was some arm’s-length relationship with the Secretary of State in these circumstances. It is quite unnecessary for the Competition Commission to do what is going to be an extremely unfamiliar job for it in assessing the methodology of setting the national tariff—far better that others who will become familiar with it should undertake that task as advisers, consultants or whatever to the Secretary of State. All these amendments make good sense.
I move finally to Amendment 269A. The regulations under Clause 61 are very important. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, referred to them in her first speech today. Understandably there is considerable debate and discussion about whether it is desirable for Monitor to exercise functions in relation to adult social care. However, we are not being asked at this stage to make a decision about it. If we were being asked to decide whether Monitor should exercise those functions, it is important that we have the debate in this House, indeed in both Houses. That is why this amendment sets out that it should be decided by the affirmative procedure, which would be an entirely proper way of dealing with it and would be on the Floor of this House. In all these cases they seem to be tightening-up provisions that recognise the importance of certain regulations and of Monitor and that the role of the Competition Commission throughout this Bill is inappropriate.
I thought there was going to be an intervention from my left. I was not going to intervene in the debate on this group. I am sorry if I missed something by missing the debate on the first group of amendments. I have some concerns about the dual role of Monitor as the arbiter of foundation trust status and the raft of new duties that it will undertake as an economic regulator. Let me make it clear that I have no problem whatever with the role of Monitor as the economic regulator and the functions that go with that. However, I want to share with the Minister and the House some of the previous Government’s thinking on whether Monitor could combine being the economic regulator and the arbiter on the passage to foundation trust status. The situation, if anything, is more difficult now. We finally concluded that we could not make Monitor the economic regulator until we were much, much further along the path of completing the job of trusts becoming foundation trusts because there were potential conflicts of interests, which we will come to later.
I raise this issue at this point because there are accountability issues here as well. I can see the very strong arguments—and I have every sympathy with the Government on this—for setting up an economic regulator and the Secretary of State not dipping in and out of those functions. If you are going to have a regulator, let it be independent and leave it to get on with the job. I am very comfortable with that. My concern is that we are already going to be loading a very large number of functions on to this economic regulator, and to expect it to carry on, even with Chinese walls, as the arbiter on foundation trust status is a big ask, given that most of the promising candidates for foundation trust status have already jumped over the bar and we are getting down to the ones that have been finding it rather difficult to jump over the bar. That could be because the Government have set themselves the target of 2016. We set ourselves targets of 2008 and 2012, and quite a lot of trusts have still got nowhere near jumping over the bar, so I certainly would not bet the farm on them all having cleared the hurdles by 2016.
Monitor, in its role as the arbiter on foundation trusts, needs to keep a very close eye on those that have cleared the bar and to intervene when it needs to. The Secretary of State is actually embroiled in that process. The cases have to be cleared by the Department of Health and the Secretary of State before they go on to Monitor. That is a long-established process. The Secretary of State is going to become involved to some extent if trusts lose their foundation trust status; they go back into the pool in a sense.
We are now dealing with a situation that is much more difficult financially and much more challenging than it was under the previous Government. We are trying to get Monitor to do an even more difficult job with the most difficult trusts in an extremely difficult climate and to take on the job of being an economic regulator. There are real issues about whether that can be done and about separating out the areas where the Secretary of State has a legitimate role. It is legitimate for the Secretary of State to have a presence in the build-up to a foundation trust application and when a trust loses that status. However, that set of issues is separate from the accountability issue when Monitor performs the role of an economic regulator. Will the Minister share with us some thinking about how those separate functions will be handled in the real world that we will face over the next three to five years?
My Lords, I wish to address my Amendments 274AA, 274C, 274D and 274E in this group. I shall speak as briefly as I can. I share many of the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on whether we are overloading Monitor with too many requirements to make judgments, to intervene and to be responsible to enable any single body to function, however brilliantly led it might be.
This amendment is about the conflict of goals on the part of Monitor. I believe that it is a very important amendment, although it looks modest enough. The Bill states that if Monitor has a conflict of objectives—or, more clearly, a conflict of duties—that will in essence be resolved by the head of Monitor making a statement about the nature of that conflict and the ways in which it could be resolved and then turning it back to the perpetrators to solve the problem as best they can. Those conflicts are substantial. We should make it clear that they are fundamental to the whole argument that we have been having, including in the brilliant previous debate because, first and foremost, the general and primary objective of Monitor is supposed to be the promotion of patient health and patient care. That is fundamental. We heard in the very eloquent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, how she thinks Monitor has changed its philosophy of life within the NHS and has become much more concerned with patient care and patient protection than with the pursuit of competition primarily for its own sake. That is a very important step forward in our understanding of the Bill.
However, it still leaves open the possibility of a conflict arising between the duties of Monitor. I have just mentioned the first of those duties—the care and concern about patients who are dependent on the health service. The second duty continues to be a concern with anti-competitive policy, and the third is concerned with integration and collaboration, about which there has been a great deal of discussion and many amendments in this House. The Bill gives us very little guidance on any conflict over which of those duties should be given priority over the others. It says that a conflict of duties or a conflict between responsibilities is to be resolved in this rather heavy-handed way of a statement being made about the nature of the conflict and how it might be resolved, which is then distributed to all those concerned. However, there is no resolution of the conflict. It remains part of what one might describe as an ongoing negotiation that some day might resolve itself in one direction or another. It has interesting parallels with yesterday’s events. However, Amendment 274E sets out very clearly that we believe that ultimately conflict should be resolved by the Secretary of State. We accept all the intervening proposals in the Bill at present—that statements should be made, that the conflict should be defined, and that it should then be passed on to those involved to try to find a solution. If, at the end of the day, no solution is found, it is absolutely crucial, in our view, that this becomes the responsibility of the Secretary of State as the ultimate goal of any accountability or responsibility within the service itself.
In this House I think we have got much closer to recognising how significant this final duty over a range of issues is. The Secretary of State is open to accountability to Parliament and to the general public, the people of England, so we say in Amendment 274E that if no solution can be found, there should ultimately be a reference back to the Secretary of State, who then has to make this ultimate decision. We have deliberately framed it to say that he is the ultimate decider, not one of those deciders on the way, although Monitor certainly has a role in resolving the conflict.
Since the future health service will in part be defined by what is seen to be the most significant of those duties, I think the Minister and most of us in this House believe that that central duty has to be responsibility to the patient and to the care and protection of the patient. I urge us to give this very serious consideration, because it is part of the pyramid that was set out in the brilliant speeches in an earlier debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones, and by my noble friend Lord Newton of Braintree, who has now had to leave us. I therefore propose the amendment in that spirit. It puts into a microcosm the concept of where the most responsible and urgent duties on Monitor lie.
My Lords, I think that this has been a very useful debate. The Bill provides a more autonomous NHS, and it does so in order to deliver high-quality services and value for money. Monitor, as sector regulator, would establish clear standards and rules to protect patients’ interests in the provision of NHS services. Monitor would be required to lay its annual report and accounts before Parliament and have the accounts audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General. It would also need to comply with other rules and guidance that cover central government public bodies, including the seven general principles of public life, the Treasury’s guidance document, Managing Public Money, and rules on corporate governance. Monitor would also have to respond in writing to parliamentary committees and any advice from HealthWatch England. The Secretary of State would oversee Monitor’s performance of its functions to ensure that those functions were performed well. The Secretary of State would not have control over Monitor’s day-to-day decisions, but would hold Monitor to account for discharging its duties. That point is extremely relevant in the context of a number of amendments in this group. The Secretary of State would appoint the chair of Monitor and other non-executive directors and would have to give consent to the appointment of the chief executive. I hope that point answers Amendments 260F and 260G.
Baroness Thornton: We are yet again in the territory of Monitor setting its own rules and implementing them, and of the Secretary of State’s role. The Minister has just said that the Secretary of State will, as it were, monitor Monitor. Can he please describe to us how exactly he will do that?
My Lords, I will come on to that in a moment. The Secretary of State would also have specific powers of veto; for example, over the first set of licence conditions and, in individual cases, of provider unsustainability, where he considered that Monitor was failing in its functions to support commissioners in securing continuity of services. In addition, he would be able to request information from Monitor regarding the exercise of its functions as and when he considered it necessary. I hope that this therefore allays the concerns of noble Lords who put their names to Amendment 260H.
However, Monitor needs to be free from day-to-day political and other inappropriate interference in order for it to be able to act in the best interests of patients. In order to maintain the integrity of its relationship with the Secretary of State, Monitor must be able to take independent decisions on the exercise of its functions, such as calculating prices, setting and enforcing licence conditions and resolving conflicts of interests. Making such decisions subject to approval would be inconsistent with this approach, and would conflate responsibilities. In particular, it would undermine the Secretary of State’s ability to hold Monitor to account. There would also be significant risk of decisions being politicised inappropriately. By contrast, independence in such decisions would increase transparency and help ensure that providers were treated fairly.
I understand the motives of noble Lords who added their names to Amendments 274AA, 274C, 274D and 247E, relating to the Secretary of State’s involvement in resolving conflicts of interest. The Government agree that where they occur, conflicts must be resolved, but giving the Secretary of State a role in decision-making would undermine his ability to hold Monitor to account. The Secretary of State would be obliged to keep under review Monitor’s performance in discharging its duties. He would be able to direct Monitor, where it had failed or was at risk of failing significantly, to carry out its functions. In extremis, he could arrange for a third party to perform those functions or perform functions himself. I hope that those points answer the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.
The Bill also ensures transparency and fairness, through requirements on Monitor to consult widely when discharging functions and appeal mechanisms for the major decisions it makes. Here, I am addressing Amendments 294BA, 294BB, 294BC. In this way, our proposals strike a balance between maintaining sufficient independence and ensuring that the Secretary of State has sufficient ability to hold Monitor to account for the performance of its functions. I believe there is consensus that we need to ensure that this balance is correct.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked why it should be the Competition Commission that decides on challenges to Monitor’s proposals on licence modifications, pricing methodologies or whatever. I am grateful to him for that question. It is fundamental to our proposals that Monitor would be an independent regulator and that the appropriate role for the Secretary of State is to oversee Monitor’s performance against its duties, and to intervene where he considered that Monitor was significantly failing in any of its functions. However, it is vital that the legislation provides appropriate checks and balances on Monitor without undermining its day-to-day independence from political control. That is why we proposed that Monitor must consult on the licence conditions that it proposes to impose on providers and on its draft methodology for pricing. Providers and, in the case of pricing, providers and commissioners should be able to object to Monitor’s proposals, and where a sufficient percentage objected, there should be a mechanism for independent and impartial adjudication. That is the role we propose for the Competition Commission. It would act as adjudicator on disputed licence modifications and on disputes over the pricing methodology. The basis for this adjudication would be Monitor’s overarching duty to protect and promote patients’ interests.
Did the Government consider any bodies other than the Competition Commission as being appropriate to fulfil this role? If so, which were they and why were they not thought to be appropriate? This is a rather heavy-duty form of monitoring Monitor.
I am puzzled by why the Government do not see the Competition Commission’s overseeing of this area of Monitor’s responsibilities as not being neutral. Would not a body such as the Office of Fair Trading be more appropriate? It has a reputation not only of being more neutral but of having shown in the past particular sensitivity and understanding of health as a service provided to the people of England.
I think it is a question of specialist expertise. I do not regard it as heavy-handed to have the Competition Commission acting in this role—which, we hope, would not be a role that it would need to perform with any regularity. It is an established body. It would apply a public interest test rather than a competition test, which is important. One has to question whether the Office of Fair Trading is the right body. I will of course reflect on my noble friend's suggestion, but we believe that the Competition Commission is a good fit in this sense. If the Secretary of State were to play the role of adjudicator, that would be very detrimental. The result would effectively be the politicisation of Monitor's decisions. As I said earlier, that in itself would undermine the Secretary of State's role in holding Monitor to account for the outcomes that it achieves.
The noble Lord, Lord Warner, referred to conflicts in the role of Monitor in overseeing foundation trusts. We are quite open about the fact that there is a risk of conflict of interest here. That is why it is essential that the Bill sets out a robust way for conflicts to be resolved. In a later debate, we can discuss that at greater length. I listened with interest to the speech of my noble friend Lady Williams, and I will of course reflect further on everything she said, as I always do. I think I have covered the main issues raised by the amendments in this group.
I think that almost the first sentence I uttered in this debate was: will Monitor meet in public; and what do the Government intend to do about joint chairmanship and chief executiveship? If the Minister answered those questions, I did not hear him and I apologise.
The answer is yes.
The Minister said that he thought that the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Williams—Amendment 274AB, et cetera—would undermine the role of the Secretary of State and his ability to call Monitor to account. That seems a very far-fetched way to describe an attitude to conflict-resolution. The Secretary of State, particularly under Amendment 274E, is asked to resolve conflict. This is an addition. There is no other way, as far as I can see, of resolving conflict. A key issue, which has also been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, in this debate, has been the multiplicity of roles of Monitor. Therefore, there is a strong need to resolve such conflicts.
I ask the Minister to consider further whether that is really detracting from the Secretary of State's ability to monitor Monitor—in the words of the noble Baroness. We need a mechanism to resolve conflict. Faute de mieux, this seems to be the best one.
My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says, but the fact is that the amendments he refers to would reduce Monitor’s independence from political interference. We are clear that we do not want political interference in Monitor’s activities. The intent of the amendment is clearly to give the Secretary of State increased accountability for the decisions around Monitor's functions. We believe that Monitor will be an effective regulator and able to deal with conflicts of interest. Clause 63 requires Monitor to resolve conflicts between its functions. If a failure to resolve conflicts between functions was significant, then the Secretary of State already has the power to intervene under Clause 67. Therefore, there is an intervention mechanism but we suggest that it should be triggered only in the circumstances to which I have referred.
Will the Minister say whether, if Monitor is to meet in public, it will have reserve powers to allow it to go in camera if for any reason it may be required to consider highly sensitive personal information, which ought to preserve confidentiality in respect to the individuals concerned? It is crucial that such a power should be available to it.
The answer is yes, although we do not expect that Monitor would ever have occasion to see named patient records.
My Lords, I think this has been an extremely useful debate. I can see why this Government may not trust their Secretary of State to hold Monitor to account. However, I am concerned about the idea that because we—and I do not just mean Members on this side of the House—are anxious that accountability rests in the right place in the Bill, that must therefore translate into political influence or micromanaging. I do not think that is at all the case here. Therefore, we do have an issue still to explore regarding the accountability of Monitor.
I also think we need to explore whether the Competition Commission is the right place for a public interest test to rest. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, may have made a useful suggestion about which other bodies could possibly undertake that function. Again, we find that this quango is determining its own rules and then implementing them. That is not a satisfactory situation. However, I did take hope from the fact the Minister said yes to the question of whether the chair and chief executive of Monitor would not continue to be the same person, and that Monitor should meet in public. Is the Minister accepting Amendments 260EC and 260GA, or is that the statement of principle with a government amendment coming forward at a later stage or, indeed, a letter from the Minister, clarifying the issue? Otherwise, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
I was accepting that particular principle, but I will follow it up in writing.
Amendment 260EC withdrawn.
Amendments 260F to 260H not moved.
Schedule 8 agreed.
Clause 59 : General duties
Amendment 261 not moved.
Amendments 261A and 261B had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendments 262 to 264 not moved.
Amendment 264A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendments 265 to 265A not moved.
Amendment 265B had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendment 265C not moved.
Amendment 266
Moved by
266: Clause 59, page 87, line 21, at end insert “and in discharging this duty will conduct and publish within one year of Royal Assent a review of the anti-competitive barriers that restrict NHS patients from benefiting from new or existing organisations providing new or extended NHS services that defined quality standards, together with their proposals for removing these barriers”
My Lords, this amendment is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I begin by briefly making clear my position on competition, which underpins this amendment. I am sorry that I had to miss the discussion on the first group of amendments. However, my position on competition is no different from what it was when I was the NHS reform Minister in the Blair Government, but it is somewhat different from that of the current Front Bench, as will become clear.
I start from a position of being opposed to monopolies, whether they are in the public or private sectors, and I consider that such research evidence as is available—such as that by Dr Zack Cooper at the LSE—supports the view that competition—
I apologise. I think that the group we should be addressing begins with an amendment in my name. Unfortunately, I withdrew that amendment last week but it has continued to appear in the Marshalled List, for which I apologise. I believe that we should be moving on to the next amendment in that group.
Perhaps I may clarify matters for the Committee. The group that we are now discussing begins with Amendment 265ZA, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, but which she did not move. However, the amendments in the group following that one were called in their place.
My Lords, we seem to have skipped a whole group, but for what purpose? I was planning to move Amendment 267ZF. Has there been some discussion between the usual channels?
We are on the group beginning with Amendment 265ZA, which was not moved. The next two amendments in the group were also not moved. I then called Amendment 266, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, which he is now addressing.
My Lords, I think that that is inadvertent. We seem to have missed a whole group of amendments.
Perhaps I may help. I think that the thing to do is to deal with this group of amendments and the noble Lord can then move his amendment. We will then take the group of amendments that we should have been taking out of turn. Am I right in that? I think that that is the best thing to do.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness.
Is the Committee happy for me to continue? I consider that research evidence as is available, such as that carried out by Dr Zack Cooper at the LSE, shows the benefits of competition and supports the view that competition, when used sensibly, improves services for patients and can indeed save lives. It is perfectly possible to support both competition and integration; they are not mutually incompatible. I shall not pursue the evidence base for my views today. However, I should like to clarify briefly the circumstances in which we should be supporting the use of competition in the NHS in the best interests of patients and why it is important to tackle barriers to entry to the NHS market. It is important to recognise that we already have an NHS market in which many NHS providers do indeed compete for patients against other NHS providers. The Bill does not suddenly inject competition into the NHS but merely tries to impose some better rules and a system for regulating that competition.
There are basically three sets of circumstances in which competition could—not should—be used. The first is that, as a matter of principle, all NHS providers should be subject to market testing periodically. The second is when there is clear provider failure and it seems sensible to test the market to establish the best set of arrangements for replacing the failed incumbent. The third is where there is a set of circumstances when the NHS itself—the commissioners in practice—wish to change significantly the way in which services are provided and it is not apparent that the current incumbents can adjust quickly to the patient’s needs. The first set of circumstances has often caused a great deal of angst in the discussion of competition. I certainly do not start from that position. I believe that it is the second and third areas that I have described where we need to examine whether there are real barriers to entry by new providers, irrespective of whether those providers come from elsewhere in the NHS—from the private sector, social enterprise or the voluntary organisations.
Amendment 266 is concerned to establish much more clearly than now what the barriers to NHS market entry are. We know from the work of the collaboration and competition panel that primary care trusts have behaved in anti-competitive ways and have frustrated the best interests of patients. We know from the experience of the East Surrey nurses when they tried to set up a social enterprise how frustrated they were at changing themselves from NHS employees into a social enterprise so that they could compete for NHS business. We know that across the voluntary sector, voluntary organisations have been frustrated over their attempts to compete for NHS services over a long period of time. We also know that many private providers of services find the tendering processes for providing NHS services prolonged and excessively expensive and that they are too often frustrated by shifting political opinions about the desirability of competition.
I could go on with examples of the way in which the NHS has effectively shut the door to new entrants. Some of the most recent examples are the ways in which many primary care trusts divested themselves of their provider services without any proper system of market testing when it was clear that many of those services were extremely inefficient. We need to take the NHS out of its comfort zone in a future where it faces a huge set of demographic and financial challenges. Keeping it in the NHS family is no longer acceptable or in the public interest. We need an independent, authoritative and robust analysis of the barriers to entry to the NHS market so that we can consider what action should be taken to remove those barriers. Amendment 266 proposes that Monitor does this within a year of Royal Assent. I believe that Monitor would welcome being given this assignment but I would be more than willing to consider alternatives if the Government thought, for example, that the Office of Fair Trading was a more appropriate organisation to do the job. It is important that we get this job done as speedily as possible. I also support Amendments 278 and 287 to which the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will be speaking and to which I have added my name.
My Lords, I am very grateful that Amendment 265C has somehow managed to escape from the tsunami of amendments so that I can bring it to the Committee’s attention very briefly. It is again an amendment that seeks to make sure that when competition is allowed or encouraged—the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has spoken on these lines himself—it should be because it clearly improves the quality of health and the quality of provision within society as a whole. The purpose of Amendment 265C is to make it clear that competition is welcome when it improves the quality of the service; it narrows inequalities; it ensures, in particular, that there should be a better outcome as a result of that competition; and it is, therefore, a relatively qualifying condition to permitting competition to flourish.
We have heard a number of very well informed speeches in the House, not least from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, to the effect that in some situations competition can clearly encourage innovation, can improve new approaches and can help in providing the NHS a way forward to deal with the huge problems that we all recognise exist. However, in large part we are also very worried about the idea of competition as the ruling principle of the health services in this country, and we heard a very moving set of evidence from the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about the devastation that unrestrained competition can exercise on a health service.
However, having spent 10 years of my life in the United States, I absolutely corroborate that. I know far too many people, one or two of whom are National Health Service refugees to this country, of outstanding talent, who are not in a category where they can afford the huge prices that are charged for complex and chronic conditions in the United States. How do we achieve this difficult balance so as to have competition that improves the quality of the health service but does not bring about the devastation of a great many human beings because they simply cannot afford the cost of complex operations or looking after the chronically ill? The situation of the chronically ill in the United States is pathetic in very many cases.
Therefore, this amendment and several others in this group would enable us to walk this delicate line in a way that permits competition, but competition that is in the interests of the patients of the health service and not competition that could devastate the health service itself.
My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 287B. In his speech at the outset of today’s debate, the Minister said that there were four areas where he was considering amendments to Part 3, which deals with Monitor. If memory serves, he said there were areas where the Bill had not been completely amended to conform to the Future Forum report. This is a particular example of that.
Clause 96, the supplementary conditions, says it is possible for Monitor to include conditions that require,
“the licence holder to do, or not to do, specified things or things of a specified description … within such period as may be specified in order to prevent anti-competitive behaviour in the provision of health care services for the purposes of the NHS”.
Of course, that mirrors the duties of Monitor as set out in Clause 59, which says:
“Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to preventing anti-competitive behaviour”—
so far, so good. However, Monitor also has a duty to,
“exercise its functions with a view to enabling health care services provided for the purposes of the NHS to be provided in an integrated way where it considers that this would”
improve quality and so on. There is no mirror of that particular duty in the supplementary conditions in Clause 96, which is why this amendment adds the following wording:
“or for the purposes of encouraging the integration of services in the interest of people who use such services”.
A number of other examples are the subjects of amendments as well and will no doubt come up in the course of the Bill. It seems to me that the equal and opposite to the anti-competitive duty of Monitor, which is enshrined in the ability to set conditions and so on, is not mirrored in the integration of services, and this is an extremely good example of that. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to indicate that it is simply an oversight and it should be included in the Bill.
My Lords, I wanted to come in on this matter of anti-competitive practices and the role of Monitor in it. I apologise to the Committee if some of these matters have already been covered, but I was unable to be here this morning. However, this seems like an opportunity to speak, as we are discussing Monitor’s role in anti-competitive practice.
I am concerned that we have not yet talked about the quite serious anti-competitive practice that exists in the NHS today, and how damaging it is. As we know, the independent co-operation and competition panel has highlighted a range of tactics that are very common at the moment in the NHS and which go seriously against patients’ interests. We have not sufficiently considered these when we are looking at competition. We tend to think of competition in relation to the independent sector versus the NHS in approaching the provision of services, but in fact it is this anti-competitive practice within the NHS which is so damaging. An example of this is the protection of certain local services against providers for elective operations, and so on.
I can think of an example in my own backyard, at Barts and The London—and this is a very real case. For years and years Barts used the mainstream orthopaedic services to provide local podiatry services, at a very high cost and very anti-competitively against the local community services, which had very skilled podiatrists who were able to do foot operations very cheaply and simply with a much smaller waiting list. Those sorts of anti-competitive practices are rife throughout the NHS, and are against patients’ best interests. It is utterly crucial that this role to reduce as much anti-competitive practice as possible should be watched by Monitor, but we want it to be co-ordinated with its role on integration—there is absolutely no reason why the two things cannot go side by side.
I am sure that we will come on to mergers and acquisitions, but the recent protection of patients and the public—for example, against the merger of two mental health trusts, Norfolk and Waveney, and Suffolk—seems to me to be extremely good judgment about what is likely to be in patients’ best interests. We should remember these matters of anti-competitive practice that are, as I say, rife in the NHS, and we really need to do quite a lot to stamp them out. I hope that the role of Monitor in working on these practices in patients’ best interests will be strongly supported.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was most helpful in setting out the criteria with which one would want to look at competition, and emphasising the importance of competition. But there is another area of competition, which is the one that really drives up quality of care: the inherent competitiveness of different clinicians and different clinical services, their desire to have better clinical outcomes than others, and the pressure that they will put on themselves within their own team to achieve better clinical outcomes.
I apologise to the House if I contributed in any way to the confusion over the numbering of the amendments as they have arisen. I would like to address the ones that come after Amendment 266, which will be Amendments 268B and 267C. Amendment 267C was tabled because of the large number of patients with complex clinical conditions.
It is very easy, when we are thinking about tariffs and services, to look almost at discrete nuggets of care, diagnosis and so on. Indeed, Monitor has a requirement in the Bill to seek appropriate advice to effectively discharge its functions in,
“the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of illness, or … the protection or improvement of public health”.
The amendment related to the management of a wide range of complex conditions has been tabled because in complex conditions many situations overlap and cannot be discretely targeted together, nor can they necessarily be unpacked one from another because of their impact on each other. That requires integration of clinical services.
The noble Baroness might be aware that Amendment 267C has leapfrogged from the group with Amendment 264 to the group after this. She may wish to address that amendment when we come to that group.
I thank the noble Baroness. I am most grateful. That message had not reached me, although I may be a little deaf. I shall simply confine my remarks to the amendment in this group about Monitor reporting annually to the Secretary of State on how it discharges its duty to promote integration. I do not think that the comments that I made previously are annulled. They are relevant because, unless we have integrated services—however much they may be seen to be in competition with each other over different aspects—and attempt to have a seamless provision of care, at the end of the day it will be the patients who fall through the gaps.
Earlier today, we heard a lot about Monitor being light touch, not having a series of minimum criteria and being able to use its discretion in how it grants licences of all sorts. But I have a concern that there has to be a means by which the way in which Monitor functions is transparent and available to public scrutiny. That is why I have suggested that an annual report to the Secretary of State would allow such scrutiny to occur, particularly as regards promoting integration.
My Lords, in the first instance, I shall speak to Amendments 267ZDA and 269 in the names of my noble friend Lady Thornton and myself. Amendment 267ZDA refers to the need for integration. Indeed, there are a series of amendments on integration, with which I will try to deal as a group. Amendment 267ZDA gives an interpretation of integration which would,
“mean that health-related and social care services are provided in such a manner that individuals will experience services … as being independent of organisational barriers”—
which I suppose is the very definition of integration—and which offers patients,
“the most appropriate involvement in their care choices … which reduce … the need for separate assessments; and … which result in a care plan for the individual which covers all aspects of their care”.
Surely that aspiration would be shared by the Committee and widely within both the health and social care professions. It would seem to make sense to incorporate it in the Bill. However, Amendment 269 simply makes clear that it is unnecessary for a provision in the Bill to repeat a definition of anti-competitive behaviour since that already exists in existing legislation, although that is not a hugely important point.
In relation to other amendments in terms of integration, we certainly support Amendment 268B, which would provide the duty for Monitor to report annually as to how it has promoted integration. Amendment 274B seeks a requirement to publish a statement if conflicts between its functions arise which are likely to have a significant impact on integration of services. Amendments 278 and 278B impose requirements on the national Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups to extend the right of patients to make choices in respect of the integration of healthcare and to ensure the integration of services where that is in the public interest. Again, the aim is to drive the integration agenda. Then, as an overarching provision, Monitor would have under Amendment 278C the power to investigate whether the Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups are complying with those requirements. All of these seem to be perfectly sensible amendments to provide the right structure and one which Monitor could effectively supervise.
Still on the integration agenda, there are later amendments—Amendments 286A, 287 and 287B—which impact on integration. Amendment 286A allows a modification of Monitor’s powers to encourage integration, if that is in the interest of patients, as it usually will be, presumably. The amendments provide for modifications to licence conditions—again in the interest of integrated healthcare—to ensure that standing conditions of licences include requirements relating to or encouraging the integration of healthcare services. All that makes a sensible package to drive an important part of the underlying concept of the Bill and the too-long-deferred integration of services.
The other amendments in this group essentially relate to the issues of collaboration or competition. Here, it is slightly unfortunate that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay—I am sorry, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins—did not move Amendment 265ZA, which stresses that Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to promoting collaboration and preventing competitive behaviour. I think that is the other side of the coin that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, put on the table previously when she was complaining, perhaps rightly, about anti-competitive practices within the NHS. A more positive way of looking at that agenda is to say that NHS bodies should collaborate on the provision of services, rather than take a negative stance. That is, I suppose, a necessary fallback position, but the prime objective must be to ensure collaboration within and across health service provision and—having regard to what has just been indicated in relation to integration—with social services as well. That is probably the right approach.
Other amendments in this group relating to competition raise some other issues. For example, under Amendment 265C, there is a suggestion that Monitor’s duty to prevent anti-competitive behaviour should be qualified by requiring it to aim to improve the quality of services and outcomes and the efficacy of provision and reduce inequalities. These are listed separately; I take it that all of them—rather than any alternative—are intended to be part of Monitor’s duty. If the Minister were minded to accept the thrust of that argument, he would do so in that sense.
Again, there is the provision under Amendment 266, tabled by my noble friend Lord Warner, for Monitor to conduct and publish a review of anti-competitive barriers and their impacts within a year of Royal Assent. There may well be some sense in that, particularly in regard to the way in which he moved the amendment. There are similar duties on Monitor to look at impact assessments under Amendment 275. Government Amendment 278D, to be moved by the Minister later, refers to non-disclosure of the “business interests” of parties. Does that extend to the interests of, say, trusts or voluntary sector providers? Does “business” relate to their activities or would it be confined to commercial providers? It seems to me that it would be invidious if only one part of the provider sector had the protection of confidentiality; it should be applicable to all or none. There is of course no issue with the amendment that requires individual circumstances not to be subject to disclosure.
I have a question about Amendment 278J, which requires the Competition Commission to review the “occurrence” rather than the “development” of competition in the provision of healthcare services. It is not clear to me what the significance of the word “occurrence” is. This is not a government amendment and I do not know whether those who originally tabled it want to clarify the position. I understand the amendment if it requires the Competition Commission to review the impact of competition in the provision of healthcare services, but I do not know how the occurrence of competition would be reviewed. It does not actually make much sense to use the word in this context.
The thrust of most of these amendments makes sense and sets out a sensible role for Monitor. In what would have been the next group but for the leapfrogging, we will come on to look at the issue of conflicts, and I am sure that there will be some further discussion about that. However, I hope that the Minister will feel able broadly to support the amendments in this group and recognise that they should contribute to meeting the shared objectives that have emerged from today’s debate.
My Lords, I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the consideration of this group because for once the Committee is making faster progress than I thought, but I have tabled two amendments that relate back to the issue of anti-competitive behaviour, so I will be following on from my remarks about the first of the amendments today. I seek greater clarity from the Minister. Given that Monitor has responsibility for preventing anti-competitive behaviour—in other words, not just the encouragement of competition but also the policing of it—what happens when someone complains to Monitor? In effect, Monitor has been given the same powers as the OFT and other economic regulators in other sectors and, as my noble friend Lord Beecham has just said, is subject to some oversight by the Competition Commission, which has duties in this respect.
Let me give two examples of what in other sectors would be seen as anti-competitive behaviour. One is where two providers in an area get together to divvy up what they know the commissioning body wants and provide a package that is acceptable to the commissioning group. A third provider would like to get in on the action. It is probably qualified, so that is not a hurdle. If that provider then complains to Monitor, is Monitor able to say, “This may appear to be a bit anti-competitive, but actually it is in the interests of patients”? I assume, from all the Minister has said and from what is set out in the document about the role of Monitor, that it means it can say that. But is that the end of the story? Can there be an appeal against Monitor to the courts or, if it is systematic, to the Competition Commission review role?
There is also the opposite scenario: competition laws relate to monopsony and oligopsony as well as to monopoly and oligopoly, so if a number of commissioning groups get together and decide that they will buy collectively from particular providing groups but not from others, is that also grounds for appeal to Monitor? If Monitor nevertheless decides that that is in the interests of patients, is there a further recourse? I was worried earlier today that there might be further recourse and that, despite all the assurances that have been given, Monitor is not actually the final regulator on what is in the patients’ interests, because it is supposed to act in accordance with or reflect the general rules, including EU rules, on competition and procurement.
This situation is going to arise because, with the Government’s encouragement, there will be more providers than those which get commissioned. A failed or disappointed provider must know how the system is supposed to work so that Monitor can look at it and be judged on it. With other economic regulators there is a form of appeal in this respect, to the Competition Commission. It is not used very frequently, but when we are trying to bed in a new system it may well be used more frequently by disappointed and failed competitors. If that is not to happen, it has to be clear in this Bill—and if not in this Bill then by ministerial decree and in regulations—that once Monitor decides something is in the interest of patients that is the end of the story. Otherwise, I cannot see the system working without constant appeals and second guessing.
My Lords, I shall be brief in speaking to these amendments. I wholly agree with the principle outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. There are many circumstances in which competition, properly controlled, will benefit the National Health Service and will benefit our community. But, like the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I too, having worked in the United States, would be deeply concerned if competition were allowed to run riot. Years ago, I saw the affect of this. For instance, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, where I worked many years ago, the president of the hospital told me that they were required to debate and negotiate with no fewer than 47 different insurance companies in order to obtain coverage for the patients whom they treated.
Yet in the United States you still find, in certain communities, perfectly acceptable patterns of community care which are in many ways excellent, not least the Kaiser Permanente plan in California. I also visited an excellent clinic and associated hospital providing a substantial range of primary, secondary and tertiary care to a very wide community in Marshfield, Wisconsin. The Marshfield clinic serves a very large community in that state. All the people in the community pay an annual subscription in return for which they get a full range of primary, secondary and tertiary care of a very high standard. There are islands of excellence.
So far as competition in this country is concerned, I have always believed that the cap imposed upon foundation trusts in relation to private patients was unfair. It was imposed at a particular moment in time and based upon income derived by those individual trusts in a preceding period, and was grossly uneven. I have always favoured a partnership between the public and private sectors. In such hospitals and foundation trusts I believe there is a great advantage to allowing them to have more income from private patient beds: it not only generates income for the National Health Service, it also persuades many consultants to become geographically whole-time, looking after their public and private patients in the same hospital and not having to spend time, as many have in the past, travelling to private hospitals.
I believe in competition and in the public-private mix. But in pursuing that type of programme, it is absolutely crucial that Monitor has the authority to prevent any foundation trust from overstepping the mark and increasing its private provision to the extent that it will harm the services that it gives to NHS patients. I would love to have an assurance from the Minister that Monitor will be able to fulfil the function of controlling excesses which could damage the National Health Service if private provision went too far.
My Lords, briefly, we are getting a bit confused between the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, which I support and is about anti-competitive behaviour, and people talking against competition. The amendment is quite clear. It asks Monitor, within a year, to identify barriers to quality care that are anti-competitive. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, gave one example and there are others, such as optometry services, which can, if given the opportunity to expand, not only provide good diagnostic services but also treat some minor ailments that do not need referral to hospital. Our amendment is about anti-competitive behaviour. It is not about competition.
My Lords, there are some extremely helpful amendments in this group. Indeed, there has been a great deal of valuable debate both inside and outside the Chamber on the roles of competition and integration in the health service. I am grateful for much of what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said in his introductory speech.
The Government have been clear that both competition and integration can be important tools for commissioners to drive up the quality of services for patients. We have also been clear that it will be for commissioners to decide where and how these tools should be used—not Monitor. There will be no “one size fits all” or a model prescribed by government.
To help ensure that both competition and integration are effective, Part 3 of the Bill seeks to establish appropriate powers for Monitor. Where there is competition, Monitor will have powers to ensure that it operates effectively in the interests of patients and to safeguard against anti-competitive conduct that can work against those interests. The Future Forum concluded that Monitor, as a sector-specific regulator with knowledge and expertise in health services, would be best placed to achieve this. Let me remind the Committee that this is if there is competition. In some circumstances, I freely concede that commissioners may decide that the best way to achieve high-quality services for patients is not to have competition.
On Amendment 265C, I hope that noble Lords will agree that it is the right approach to require Monitor’s focus to be on considering the interests of patients. That will allow Monitor the scope to take account of a broad range of factors. This approach also provides continuity with the requirements of the existing system rules, the Principles and Rules for Co-operation and Competition, which we have committed to retaining and giving a firmer statutory underpinning through Monitor’s sectoral powers. Those powers are the setting and enforcement of licence conditions for providers and the overseeing of commissioning regulations set by the Secretary of State. Along with the concurrent powers to apply the Competition Act with the Office of Fair Trading, they will provide necessary safeguards to ensure that the interests of patients are protected.
To pick up on the sorts of circumstances cited by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that would include, for example, safeguarding against providers exchanging information to agree lower levels of service quality than they would otherwise supply if they were in competition; or a commissioner removing a well performing provider from the choices available to patients, or seeking to direct patient referrals to one provider and not another on non-clinical grounds.
However, it is not the case that every arrangement in the provision of healthcare that had the effect of restricting competition would necessarily be anti-competitive. I made that point in one of our earlier debates. I look particularly in the direction of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, in saying that Monitor’s core duty means that patients’ interests will always come first. For example, in some cases limiting competition by concentrating specialist services in regional centres or in providing services through a clinical network may deliver overriding benefits to patients and would not, therefore, be anti-competitive. Similarly, where an integrated service raises competition concerns, and equally where services offering more choice and control raise concerns over integration, Monitor will always come back to its core duty—to ask itself the question, “What is it that benefits patients the most?”.
The Government appreciate the clear consensus for further integration and more joined-up services. Integrated care pathways can enable increased collaboration between hospitals and clinicians, between public and independent sector services and between health and social care providers. The Bill seeks to encourage and enable that. In addition to powers relating to competition, Monitor has an overarching duty to enable integration where this would improve services or reduce inequalities for patients.
Monitor will have a range of functions at its disposal to achieve this—for example, supporting the NHS Commissioning Board in identifying and spreading good practice in the development of reimbursement systems. Here I am particularly addressing Amendments 286A, 287 and 287B. Monitor would also be able to use its licensing conditions to enable integration, subject to the making of regulations provided for in Clause 95(2)(h)—for example, to reflect principle 4 of the existing Principles and Rules for Co-operation and Competition and require providers to exchange information with commissioners and other providers to ensure that the patient experience is of a seamless health service, regardless of organisational boundaries.
I am also sympathetic to the intention of Amendment 274B as I agree that it is important that Monitor is transparent in managing conflicts effectively, including where there may be decisions to take on matters of integration. However, I believe that the requirements already set out in the Bill are comprehensive. This is because resolving a conflict that has a significant impact on the integration of services would also have a significant impact on patients or persons who provide healthcare services.
I turn to the specific issues on the reviews that the Bill proposes are undertaken by the Competition Commission of competition in the provision of NHS services and the exercise of Monitor’s functions. I have listened carefully to the various arguments and concerns that have been put forward about this proposal and, as I have intimated previously, I will reflect further on the points that have been made on these reviews, with a view to bringing forward proposals on Report.
I turn to Amendment 266, which is where we began. I do not take exception to the idea put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, at least in principle, but Monitor would have the power to carry out the kind of review that the noble Lord suggests that it should. I am not sure that it would be helpful to compel it to use its resources in exactly the way that he proposes. The particular issue here is the timing. It might be helpful for any such review to be later, once the reformed system is more established.
Amendment 267ZDA provides a definition of integration, referring to services being independent of organisational barriers. I am sympathetic to what it is trying to achieve but I am not sure that the proposed definition, which focuses largely on structures and processes, fully captures integration seen from the point of view of the patients. We see integration as a means of improving patient outcomes rather than—to return to an earlier theme—an end in itself. We do not want to be prescriptive about how commissioners decide to integrate services.
Amendment 269, which the noble Lord also proposed, would remove the provision that Monitor should exercise its functions with a view to preventing anti-competitive behaviour in the provision of NHS services. It is important that Monitor plays this role to protect patients’ interests against collusion and so on. However, if these amendments were accepted, Monitor would still have its concurrent powers with the OFT but would not be required to use its other functions, such as licensing, to tackle abuses or distortions, and that would be retrograde.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in her Amendment 268B also brought us to the subject of integration. Monitor will enable integration, as I have already said. It will be for commissioners to drive that. Monitor would have to publish an annual report on how it had discharged its functions and Schedule 8 gives the Secretary of State the power to ask Monitor for specific reports. This could include how Monitor was discharging its duty to enable integration.
Amendment 267ZDA again is one that I am sympathetic to but I come back to the criticism that I made earlier that it is rather structure and process orientated. While I am with the noble Lord in spirit perhaps he would like to think again about how that amendment might be worded. He asked me about confidentiality and business interests in the government amendments—these would indeed apply to all providers whatever their sector and whether an individual or an organisation.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, asked whether an aggrieved provider could appeal beyond Monitor. The answer is no. What the noble Lord has described would be an issue of procurement and not competition law. Commissioners, as long as they work within guidance and regulations, can decide when, how and if to use competition, including whether to restrict the number of providers to maintain service quality and sustainability.
Finally, I turn to the amendments that it falls to me to speak to in this group. Both of them are minor and technical; their purpose is to tidy up the Bill and I hope that they will be agreed when moved.
I want to briefly respond to what the noble Earl said about Amendment 266, particularly in the light of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, made about a good deal of anti-competitive behaviour being already quite well entrenched in the NHS. Simply waiting longer to get it even more entrenched before Monitor has a go at the issue of the barriers for new entrants to the NHS market simply gives the signal to the NHS that it can go on as it has been going on. It seems to me that it is important to give a signal that there is a new show in town and that the issue of the barriers to entry, particularly in the light of the report by the Co-operation and Competition Panel, are going to be addressed. I am not sure that waiting longer for the new systems to settle down is going to be in the best interest of the NHS or Monitor and I wonder if he might think a bit more about this and perhaps we could have a further discussion.
My Lords, the noble Lord makes a telling point. I took on board entirely what the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said in her contribution. I will of course reflect further in the light of what the noble Lord has just said.
I beg your pardon. I am rather dozy this afternoon on this group of amendments. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 266 withdrawn.
Amendment 266A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendment 267 not moved.
Amendments 267ZA to 267ZD had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendment 267ZDA not moved.
Amendment 267ZDB
Moved by
267ZDB: Clause 59, page 88, line 6, at end insert—
“(c) local authorities carry out their duties in providing social care for children in their area, and to the smooth transfer of their caring responsibility when a child moves into adult social care services.”
My Lords, this group of amendments concerns children, particularly their social care. We have laid these amendments because we could find nothing in the Bill that mentions this. Children’s services will be commissioned potentially by six different groups. The Commissioning Board at national and at sub-national level, particularly through health visitors, will be responsible for the public health of children under five—until 2015 when that will transfer to local authorities—and also for primary care. That is often the first point of contact for problems in children which require a great deal of social care intervention integrated with healthcare provision. Public Health England is responsible for public health campaigns and health protection. The clinical commissioning groups will again be involved potentially at two levels; supra-locally and locally. The sixth area is the local authorities with the healthy child programmes for those aged five to 18, school nurses and child health for the nought to five year-olds after 2015, which is when the health visitors transfer.
However, all these different aspects of healthcare interrelate very closely with children’s social care. There are concerns over accountability, how the services will keep track of complex provision and who will be responsible for children’s health and welfare, particularly as regards obese children and those who have been bereaved. There is concern about children’s reaction to grief and the impact that this has on social behaviours, and how the public health services which deal with the prevention of childhood obesity can be evaluated and held to account.
Health visitors are the eyes and ears of the child aspects of primary care. However, there is concern about how they will relate to the primary care and accident and emergency sectors and social workers when they transfer to local authorities. How will the information on the at-risk register be transferred and how will access to primary care records be speeded up? Will the IT systems be compatible to enable effective information transfer between child and adult services, particularly when children who have multiple social problems reach an age when they will be transferred to adult services? There is particular concern about children with severe learning difficulties and developmental delays who require a great deal of social care input. They cannot be their own advocates and are extremely dependent on others. Therefore, it is important that the relevant information is successfully transferred. We know from previous tragic child abuse cases that information which has to be moved from one sector to another often gets lost, drops through the gaps and children suffer as a result.
There must be a smooth transition from one carer to another, particularly where children’s and adult social services are provided by different providers. It is important that adult social services should be satisfied that the children’s social services have done their job properly and thoroughly because, if they have not, the patient will suffer and adult social services may be faced with an unfair cost incurred as a result of a deficiency in the services provided by the children’s social services.
Our amendments do not propose a radical solution to the problem. We are fairly confident that the Government will not accept them as they will not want further major complications in what is already a very complicated Bill. They are simply designed to provide that at some time in the future Monitor will be given the power to check that all providers of children’s social care are doing their job properly, and that when they transfer a child to adult social care there is a smooth and sensitive transfer of responsibility and a complete transfer of information so that there are no gaps through which these children can fall.
We look forward to hearing what the Government’s solution is to this problem. We rather hope that the Minister might offer us some discussions outside the Committee to try to address some of the real problems that arise when children, including those aged nought to five, transfer from children’s services into adult services, given the gaps in information provision which can occur at the transition point. I beg to move.
My Lords, it saddens me to say that 41 years ago I became opposition spokesman on the Newcastle City Council health committee. Within two years, we had the Seebohm report and a change of structure, leading to the creation of a social services committee that embraced both children’s and adult social care and replaced two committees—the old health committee and the old children’s committee. That seemed to me then and, frankly, it seems to me now to have been the right approach, because I do not think that you can sensibly divide children’s and adults’ social services. We do not have that system now. My personal view—which is not necessarily the view of the Opposition—is that it may be time to look again at that division. To an extent, the group of amendments that the noble Baroness has spoken to seeks to secure that objective.
As a consequence of the way in which amendments are ordered, the actual order of the amendments in this group is not quite logical. I suppose one should start with Amendment 269B, which would give Monitor functions relating to children’s social care services. Earlier, we touched on the possibility of Monitor having a role in respect of adult care services. Presumably, one would look at both services coming under their auspices, or neither, rather than keeping a division. Amendment 269B sets out the basic role for Monitor in this context. I note that proposed new subsection (2) would include within the functions,
“inspection of, and reporting on, the potential impact of children’s social care services in a particular area on the potential need for adult social care in that area”.
I am tempted to say “and vice versa”, because so often problems of parents and adults impinge on the needs of the children, and that would make perhaps a more rational disposition of functions.
The other two amendments in this group are, in effect, consequential, and sensibly would require local authorities to ensure a smooth transfer and, as Amendment 270AA puts it, “a careful handover” for children moving into adult social care. All of those seem to me very sensible suggestions. Nevertheless, it is probably better to look at the whole context of where social services fall within the remit of the Bill.
I imagine that there will have been some discussions between this department and the Department for Education, although the way in which Whitehall and, for that matter, local government tend to work, it is not necessarily the case that the relevant organisations come together to discuss these issues. It may be, therefore, that the Minister would wish to consult colleagues in other departments before giving a measured response. Perhaps this matter might be best brought back at Report, because it raises significant issues. As I have indicated, I have felt for some time that the division of responsibilities at the moment is not terribly sensible, with children’s social services being, arguably, at best a sort of fifth wheel on an education coach. At the very least, that matter ought to be re-examined. Perhaps it is too late in the day for it to be part of this Bill, but at some point, I think, this issue certainly needs to be referred to. I congratulate the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, on having put down this amendment, which gives us an opportunity at least to ventilate concerns about this issue.
My Lords, I understand and well appreciate the concern of the noble Baroness to ensure a high standard of children’s social care services and, in particular, a smooth transfer for young people moving from children’s to adult social care services. I would, of course, be very happy to speak to her and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about this issue away from the Committee, if they consider that to be an appropriate way forward.
On the specific amendments that we are looking at, I really do not think that Monitor is the right organisation to ensure that local authorities are carrying out their responsibilities on these issues, or to act as a regulator of children’s social care services. I am confident that existing arrangements for the regulation and inspection of children’s social care are sufficient and robust. Joint working is important and I hope that the noble Baroness will be reassured that the relevant inspectorates are already working together to improve the arrangements for joint inspection, which will address the very important issue of child to adult transition that she has raised.
Children’s social care is regulated and inspected by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills—Ofsted. Its inspection remit covers all local authority social services functions relating to children—that means services for children in need, safeguarding children, children in care and care leavers, as well as adoption and adoption support services. Local authority adoption and fostering functions must be inspected by Ofsted at a minimum of every three years. Ofsted can of course make unannounced inspections.
We are already working to improve these arrangements. Ofsted consulted over the summer on local authority child protection inspection arrangements that will be more child-centred and less bureaucratic. This new type of inspection will begin in May next year. In addition, all relevant inspectorates have agreed in principle to Professor Eileen Munro’s ideal model of joint inspection, which looks at the contribution all services make towards protecting children. Noble Lords may recall that Professor Munro last year conducted a thorough review of child protection arrangements for the Government. The Care Quality Commission is one of the inspectorates working with Ofsted to establish what those services will look like and when they will begin.
For children with special educational needs and disabilities, the recent Green Paper proposes a new education, health and care plan, covering support from birth to 25. The new plan will include a much clearer focus on the long-term outcomes for children and young people including independent living and employment. This should improve outcomes for young people with special educational needs and disabilities as they make the transition from school into employment or training.
I hope that the noble Baroness will appreciate that work in this area is ongoing. I sympathise with the tenor of all she said, but if she is content to wait for a discussion following these Committee proceedings, I hope that she will, in the mean time, withdraw the amendment.
I am grateful to the noble Earl for his response. It is those transitional points that we have been particularly concerned about. I will discuss this with the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and it would be helpful for us to have a short meeting. We are grateful for the fullness of the response from the Minister. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 267ZDB withdrawn.
Amendment 267ZE had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.
Amendment 267ZF
Moved by