Clause 1 - NHS foundation trusts
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
9:45 pm
Mr Roger Casale (Wimbledon, Labour)
I want to make a little more progress on this point. We are talking about a new form of public ownership. We have always talked about a mix of public and private sectors in the structure and delivery of public services. The question is what particular mix of public and private is in the public interest, and how public interest should be defined. We should move away from the stereotype, where one side of the debate—wrongly, I believe—says that everything that is publicly owned and run or state-owned and run is good and everything that is privately owned and run is bad, or vice versa. There must be criteria to judge whether an organisation that exists to deliver public services does so in the public interest.
One such criterion must be efficiency, and if the Opposition want to emphasise and put forward the model of a public interest company as one that can deliver services more efficiently, that must be considered. We must always look at how services can be delivered more efficiently. However, I also believe—this is why I support the model—that there must be strong democratic input and control from local communities. The model of a corporation, and the word ''corporation'', better expresses that role. At one level, these are issues of semantics, which arise especially at the early stage of a debate, but behind contrasting ideas about what things should be called are contrasting ideas about what those things are.
To return to my original point, I am a strong advocate of foundation hospitals because I believe that they represent a new form of public ownership, which is better expressed by ''public benefit corporation'' than through the term ''public interest company''.