Clause 4 - Public-private partnerships
Health and Social Care Bill
6:45 pm
Mr John Denham (Minister of State, Department of Health; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
I shall deal directly with the series of questions raised by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire.
On when the guarantee would be declared, my understanding is that it would form a contingent liability and would be declared in the financial year in which it was made. However, I am not an expert in that area. I shall look further into whether it scores as public expenditure in that year or only the year in which the guarantee was actually caused. I shall write to the right hon. Gentleman and copy the letter to members of the Committee.
It is certainly our intention to take a minority stake in LIFT, as the Secretary of State, in partnership with Partnerships UK. We believe that LIFT will be able to produce £1 billion over the period that we have set out. That will make a major contribution towards the planned refurbishment of primary care premises and the development of new premises. It is our intention that the existing streams of funding will continue at the levels which are available, so this will not become a sole or exclusive route to the refurbishment of GP premises.
As for the ability to attract LIFT into the areas where it is needed, clearly the Secretary of State has a number of tools at his disposal, including the shareholding in the company and the NHS resources that could be put into, or that already exist, within areas. A planned approach to the refurbishment of a number of different premises enables us to bundle together a variety of different properties and development opportunities in one place in a way that most purely private sector companies would find difficult to achieve.
On section 97, I apologise if the document is hard to read, but as we discussed on the first day, my officials have made strenuous efforts to be as helpful as possible to the Committee in having a consolidated version of the legislation. I noted with interest the comments made by the hon. Member for New Forest, West on the Democratic Health Network. I should not mislead the Committee: we have done this primarily to get LIFT under way, but it is possible to envisage areas where significant capital investment would be required in the NHS and where a similar model could be used in the future.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.