Clause 2 - Payments relating to past performance
Health and Social Care Bill
5:38 pm
Mr John Denham (Minister of State, Department of Health; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
Clearly, the exercise of sending out the consultation document at the end of last week was just a waste of time, as the hon. Gentleman for Runnymede and Weybridge has not read it. It says that health organisations will have automatic access to discretionary capital funds without having to bid, greater freedom to decide on the local organisation of services, the ability to address the persistent failure of red-light organisations and lighter touch monitoring by the regional office. It refers to a series of other measures on which consultation is taking place, including ways of reducing progress monitoring and prescribed processes for service development, ways of introducing lighter touch routine monitoring, the ability to develop service strategies without regional office approvals and flexibility over land sales. It covers a whole series of measures which, compared with what is uniformly applied to all trusts today, would provide greater levels of freedom. Therefore, I stand by what I say.