Clause 20 - Financial arrangements for the Board
Health and Social Care (Re-Committed) Bill
6:30 pm
Liz Kendall (Leicester West, Labour)
This is a complicated set of amendments and I will explain what I believe they really seek to achieve. The amendments give the board or, as I will now call it, NHS England more freedom to spend its money how it wants, but they give consortia, or clinical commissioning groups, less freedom to spend the money how they want. They also take away the Secretary of State’s ability to specify for the board and individual consortia how much they may spend on admin costs. That is my understanding of the amendments.
Amendment 85 deletes the current clause in the Bill that gives the Secretary of State the power to tell the board and consortia how much they may spend on administrative costs. Instead, it gives an overall limit, which gives the board the power to shift money around, including resources for admin costs.
A pattern is emerging. The commissioning board, or NHS England, will end up being a super-quango that can spend as much money as it wants on admin costs with far greater power over clinical commissioning groups. I think that GPs and others who were enthusiastic about the Government’s plans will see, step by step in the post-pause Bill, their power and influence taken away by the board in ever more centralised control.
Whatever the Minister says in his description of the financial changes, they are not technical amendments; they are amendments that will shape and drive how the NHS is run, giving NHS England greater control, commissioning groups less control and, overall, taxpayers less control over how admin costs are spent.