Clause 2 - Primary Care Trusts
NHS Reform and Health Care Professions Bill
6:15 pm
Mr Simon Burns (West Chelmsford, Conservative)
I welcome the opportunity to debate clause 2, about which we have serious reservations. It is the crucial first clause that deals with primary care trusts. PCTs will be established by orders by the Secretary of State, and the purpose of this short but important clause is to give him the powers to do so.
The arguments about PCTs are a replica of the arguments that we had this morning about SHAs. I am glad that I will not unduly bore you, Miss Widdecombe, because you were not here. We strongly believe, on the basis of even more evidence than there is in respect of SHAs, that the Government are rushing headlong into these reforms without leaving enough time for the preparatory work that is needed to bed them down and have them up and running in time for them to operate at maximum efficiency from the start.
The clause gives the Government powers to ensure that a fundamental change to the health service and its funding will take place by statute. That is important because when they introduced the legislation that set up PCTs—as you will know, Miss Widdecombe, because you were involved in opposing it—they always said, on the record in this House and in another place, that PCTs would be created only by local consent through consultation with doctors, nurses and local communities. The then Health Minister, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), and the Government spokesman in another place, Baroness Hayman, said that the Government had no plans whatever to force PCTs on local communities and health care providers; they were to emerge as and when they wished. All such concerns have been brushed away in this headlong rush to get a piece of legislation on to the statute book.
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire, the Secretary of State is confronted with many problems in the health service. Every member of the Committee will know about those through their dealings with constituents. Problems with waiting lists, whether it be the numbers of people waiting or the length of time that they have to wait; waiting times at accident and emergency departments in hospitals all over the country; the trolley waits that we hear so much about in the media and from our constituents; the postcode lottery of getting drugs such as beta interferon: those are the problems facing real people in the real world.
The Secretary of State is confusing activity with action. He thinks that if he introduces yet another structure of reform, he will be seen to be doing something. In truth, as anyone who has one iota of knowledge of the health service will have realised, there is nothing in the clause or the Bill that will help to overcome or minimise the problems facing our constituents day in, day out. They must wait longer for health care from our hospitals and suffer the indignity that the Government have created with a vengeance; a waiting list to get on to the waiting list. The irony is not only that people must wait to go into hospital; they must wait to come out of hospital because of bed-blocking problems. Clause 2 does nothing to deal with those problems.