Health Bill
3:55 pm
Andrew Murrison (Shadow Minister, Health; Westbury, Conservative)
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. At the moment, there is no incentive for that to happen, because the fee is remarkably low for a variety of reasons. One of them is the cross-subsidy between the provision of specs and the NHS test. In fact, one of the beauties of the way in which the system has evolved is that there is no real market. There is a sight test that is well respected; people know what they are going to get when they go for a test and they are content to have it. I cannot imagine that people going to see an ophthalmic practitioner in the high street really differentiate between NHS and non-NHS in the way that they most certainly now do in dentistry. To that extent, the two are not directly comparable, but I understand what my hon. Friend means.
Again, I emphasise that ophthalmic services seem to be a model to be emulated by other parts of the service. They have evolved in a way that—I sound like a salesman for the sector, which I do not mean to be—offers value for money and is incredibly accessible. No other part of our health service is quite as accessible as this one. The Minister will no doubt say that there are walk-in centres, and one can always go to an accident and emergency department to get immediate treatment, but that is not the same as obtaining primary ophthalmic services on the high street. One would have to go to continental Europe to find anything remotely similar in the provision of health services, broadly defined.
That is why we are very cautious about anything that will fundamentally change that element of health care. In that, we appear to be joined by the profession, going by the briefing notes to which the Minister referred earlier. Her reading of them is slightly different from mine, but it appears clear that the profession is very concerned about these changes. We also know that from the evidence of our constituency mailbags. In nearly five years of being an MP, I have not had one complaint about primary ophthalmic services, and we know that complaints about such services form a tiny proportion—a fraction of 1 per cent.—of all complaints received by family health services committees. That is set against the very large number of consultations that are going on year in, year out.
The lack of complaints is our assurance of quality and backs up our position. The Minister did a fine job this morning defending these seven clauses, but she will forgive me if I say that Opposition Members have the imperative on this issue and we are backed in that by the profession and by the statistics and figures, which support our contention that this is a high-quality service, providing what people want. We should not be trying to affect it or to change it fundamentally. We should be trying to emulate it elsewhere in the health service.
Amendment No. 32 was, sadly, not selected, for reasons that I have discussed. However, I am not sure whether I am permitted to mention it in the clause stand part debate. If I may just describe it in general terms—