Clause 4 - Application by NHS trusts
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
4:45 pm
Mr John Hutton (Minister of State, Department of Health; Barrow and Furness, Labour)
Yes, that is absolutely right, but whichever way we cut it, a proper process will need to be followed, and that process is already set out in existing legislation for an acute trust merger. Of course, I do not want an overly bureaucratic process; I eschew that approach altogether. However, we must
enter into this discussion with our eyes open, and must realise that, however we care to look at it, this is quite a complicated legal and organisational process. I want to find the simplest way through it.
I tell the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire and the Committee that there is an obvious way for the several acute trusts to do that—they can go through the merger process and apply to be established as an NHS foundation trust. That is perfectly possible. Nothing in the Bill precludes that from being a way forward. I suggest to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe) that that is perhaps the simplest way to cut through the problems.
Obviously, such decisions will, in the first instance, be taken locally—and rightly so. However, I enter a precautionary note: if we are talking about multiple acute trusts coming together to form one large super-trust, we must remember that the wider we cast the net in terms of acute trust reconfigurations, the further we are moving in a difficult direction. We would probably be taking the foundation trust further away from the local communities that we are considering. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire might think about a Cambridgeshire-wide NHS foundation trust. We start from a large pool of potential operations.