I want to write to Lord Warner
Did you mean many speaker:Lord Warner?
Lord Warner: ...what proportion of acute hospital trusts in England regularly conduct NHS operations on (1) Saturdays, and (2) Sundays; and whether this information is able to be published so that patients may exercise choice.
Lord Warner: ...moved so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. I agree with quite a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has said, but I am not going to be as wide-ranging as him. The Minister may be relieved to know that. I speak from the perspective of having been a Pharmaceuticals Minister who negotiated a 7% reduction in the price of branded medicines, under the old PPRS, without...
Lord Warner: May I give the Minister the answer to why they were not implemented? Successive Conservative Chancellors declined to implement them.
Lord Warner: .... I turn briefly to Amendment 143, spoken to so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, in the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull—another Covid casualty. The Government have made—if I may put it this way—a total hash of the Dilnot recommendations on page 24 of our report. These made it absolutely clear that anyone born with an eligible care need—or who developed an...
Lord Warner: ...in the debate on Amendment 112, which would support its implementation. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, thought that something more elaborate than Amendment 80 was required. That may be the case, particularly for social care, but Amendments 80 and 112 complement each other. They are not rivals or alternatives; they put in place a structure thoroughly independent of government and...
Lord Warner: ...Care Funding. The report never claimed that it would sort out all the problems of funding adult social care, although it did point out to the Government of the day—the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, may remember this—that adult social care was underfunded by about £1 billion. This was in the 2010-11 financial year. That gap has simply widened over the past decade, so that it is probably...
Lord Warner: ...a big improvement on the current situation and puts statutory pressure on the Secretary of State to produce regular workforce plans. My worry is that the plan that that amendment would produce may not be long term enough or closely tied to funding streams. Moreover, any planning done under the noble Baroness’s amendment would still be subject to Whitehall negotiation and Treasury and No....
Lord Warner: ...a carers’ assessment or reassessment in the past year. This is the context in which officialdom and Ministers have thought it a good idea to weaken the protections provided in the 2003 Act. There may have been some weaknesses in that Act, but this was not one of them, as it provided for the NHS to undertake these assessments before people were withdrawn. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of...
Lord Warner: ...position for me; I do not remember in 22 years ever having supported an amendment tabled by the noble Lord. I am beginning my third decade in this House supporting change in the law. Who knows? I may have reached my fourth decade before we have got there. During this time, I have watched many parts of the English-speaking world use their Parliaments to debate these issues and change their...
Lord Warner: ...day to be having these ideas about scale in a particular set of services when you have gone through the agony of the local consideration of reconfigurations. As a Minister, it would be better, if I may say so, to set out your views at the beginning with the clinical arguments for why this makes sense. Doing it at the end is bound to lead to suspicions. That is why I was asking the noble...
Lord Warner: ...is a good example, where we need to have more scale than many of the local pathology departments. Another one, which the Royal College of Surgeons has advocated, is elective surgery hubs, which may mean taking stuff away from a particular local hospital. Another good example is the issue of stroke specialisation, which is beneficial for patients. I have given you three examples where we do...
Lord Warner: ...used to regularly meeting elected MPs who wanted to tell me about the errors of their ways in decisions that had been taken in the public interest. There was a steady flow of them, which, if I may say, tended to get bigger the nearer you got to an election. If people wanted to go through the archives, I would refer them to the history of Lewisham Hospital and of Chase Farm Hospital, to...
Lord Warner: ...-termism. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, mentioned the House of Lords Select Committee that reported in 2017. Much more should be done because, as my noble friend Lord Stevens eloquently described, we may not be able to trust any Government to keep their mind consistently on this issue. History is not terribly reassuring on that. I am not making a party-political point; across the parties,...
Lord Warner: ...debates: they are all about trust and whether we can trust the Government to behave in a reasonable way. A lot of the amendments that have been put down have been about trying to ensure that—if I may put it as crudely as this—the Government behave well in carrying out these negotiations. We have seen a kind of emotional blindness, if I may put it that way, in the discussions we have...
Lord Warner: ...more today. There are landlords; there are schools; there are GPs; there are airlines; there are many things which we all take it for granted that we can do in our daily lives where other people may have to prove that they are entitled to be here in order to do them. I do not think that the Government convinced many of us in Committee that they really understood this issue. They were still...
Lord Warner: ...in both the EU and the UK. The Government are saying that they want the UK market authorisations to be obtained first, but the EU is the bigger market and some companies think that they may end up with shorter IP protection in the larger market if they do what the Government ask. A dual regulatory system is likely to mean higher costs, driving up NHS prices and damaging patient access to...
Lord Warner: ...six weeks, a month, a week or a weekend, and many of these projects have EU money, which has come to this country to be used to set up and run projects, but not all the work is done here. The work may be done with partners in other parts of the EU, and there is a constant flow of people. If we put barriers in the way of that movement around Europe of expert people—and many are not highly...
Lord Warner: ...want an independent review of it. The Government’s acknowledgement of the system’s weaknesses in keeping our citizens safe makes it even more important that they should be busting a gut—if I may put it that way—to ensure that the UK keeps the kind of access to those systems that it has now, despite the criticisms currently made of how we have used them. It follows that any...
Lord Warner: ...see that there are almost as many people on the Cross Benches as on the Liberal Democrat Benches who I seem to have seen in the same Lobbies that I have been voting in for the last few hours. If I may say so, we represent an independent view on many of these amendments, and I thought the noble Lord had rather understated the role we have played in trying to progress so that we can get to...
Lord Warner: ...have been wondering who from the ERG we could cast in the James Dean role. It seems to me that that is what they have been doing over the past few months. I want to make one simple point. Whatever may have happened previously on this issue, it has now become a matter of trust and confidence. The Government’s behaviour over a period of time means that it is extremely difficult to rely on...