Clause 18 - General powers
Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Bill
5:45 pm
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon, Conservative)
I hope to be brief in supporting the amendment, although the debate is an important one. The provision is a litmus test of the true measure of freedoms being granted to foundation hospitals. I can see no reason why a foundation hospital, having set up the safeguards required by the Bill, and having given ownership to local people, set up the board of governors and appointed the non-executive directors, cannot decide the pay levels necessary to recruit and retain staff, to make the organisation effective and excellent in the locality.
My primary motivation in speaking in support of the amendment is the knowledge that I have gleaned from tackling problems on a weekly basis in my constituency. The south-west has very low wage levels,
but very high house prices, and that precludes many people, especially young professionals, from buying their own houses, and means that many organisations in the west country struggle to recruit and retain sufficiently high quality people. If hospitals in the west country are to flourish and attract the right sort of skilled, medical clinicians, we must set those hospitals free to pay what is necessary in that locality to attract that quality of staff.
I appreciate that those issues may not be easily understood by all members of the Committee, and that there are parts of the country where, for example, house prices are still relatively low. I recently went to Manchester, and was stunned that there were streets of houses in central Manchester that were boarded up—they could not be given away. [Interruption.] It is absolutely true. It was in the centre of Manchester six months ago. I was taken around streets—I cannot remember the street names—where at least a third of the houses were unoccupied. People had handed the keys back to the building societies because those houses could not be sold—there were insufficient buyers.