NHS Funding

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in favour of the motion tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench. The Deputy Speaker suggested that we might introduce a bit of Christmas cheer into the proceedings, and the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) certainly painted a very rosy picture of investment in his constituency. I thought he made a very good speech, incidentally.

In case Ministers are making their Christmas lists, let me tell them that one of the first things that this Government did was cancel a new hospital that served part of my constituency in order to save £464 million. Restoring that funding might be a good use for some of the £3 billion underspend. It was not a private finance initiative scheme but a scheme that was approved by the Department of Health and the Treasury but stopped in the emergency Budget.

I want to concentrate on two specific issues that are directly linked to the motion and on the important question of trust in the Government’s pledge on the funding of our NHS. I believe that the Government are keeping the public in the dark about a range of issues relating to publicly funded contracts delivered by private sector organisations, including on cancer care.

On trust, none other than the Prime Minister broke yet another pre-election promise. Having said before the election that he would extend the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to all publicly funded organisations, he did not do so. As a result, the public cannot access information about private sector providers in the NHS. This does not apply just to the NHS. In his comments, the Prime Minister referred to other publicly funded organisations such as the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust, the Local Government Association, and traffic penalty tribunals. It is increasingly apparent that many of the large corporations that apparently enjoy cosy relations with this Tory-led Government are extremely anxious that the Prime Minister does not extend the Freedom of Information Act to them. Currently, it instead allows them to hide behind a cloak of commercial confidentiality as billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are awarded to them in barely transparent contracts. The public are deliberately being kept in the dark, and I have no doubt that an expensive lobbying campaign is under way to ensure that the Prime Minister and the Tory party do not change their minds on this issue.

Meanwhile, private companies benefit by gaining intimate knowledge of public sector bodies through their own submissions of freedom of information requests. That information is then used to undercut or outbid the very same public sector bodies when contracts are tendered or put up for renewal. Members might ask what the relevance of this is in the NHS context, but as someone who worked in the NHS, who is passionate about it, and who has tremendous admiration for the people who deliver the service, I can say that it is a huge concern to me. The area that I worked in—the pathology service that carries out diagnostic tests—is under threat. This huge uncertainty continues, and we need to know precisely what the position is.

Virgin Care, Circle, Serco, Care UK and any other private sector companies awarded a public contract to provide hospital, community or even specialist diagnostic cancer services are not subject to the FOI Act. We have no idea how these companies went about winning those lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. Under current arrangements, the best that may be hoped for in terms of any rudimentary accountability is achieved through a Commons Select Committee inquiry of the type conducted by the Public Accounts Committee chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge). However worthy this process, it is by its very nature very limited in scope, and such inquiries can only ever touch the tip of the iceberg.

This is a national scandal that has prompted me to table early-day motion 773, which has attracted quite a wide range of support, mostly from Labour Members. It calls for the FOI Act to be extended to private sector bidders for public service contracts, particularly in organisations such as the NHS.

My concern is that this has overtones of the Government’s response to Leveson, in so far as I do not believe that the Government want their corporate friends to be accountable to Parliament, even though our public services are being awarded to those companies in ever greater numbers. We should follow the public pound and ensure that we know who is getting it, and how and why they are spending it.

The Secretary of State has said that there will be no large expenditure projects that are not fully thought out and properly costed. That brings me to my second point. Responses to FOI requests from my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) have made it clear that the Secretary of State is presiding over cuts to essential cancer networks, yet we know that he is planning to spend £250 million of taxpayers’ money on two proton machines, even though, according to the Department of Health’s own report, there is little evidence that they provide any benefit. There are no clinical trial data and no randomised control trials, which are the gold standard by which the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence judges the effectiveness of clinical therapies. Indeed, the new chair designate of NICE appeared before the Health Select Committee earlier this week and said exactly that.

The economic justification for purchasing those two machines has been based on informal discussions with the manufacturers who make them. If the machines are to be viable for the two hospitals that are to have them, they will need to treat 1,350 patients a year at a cost of £40,000 per patient. However, according to the Department of Health’s own dataset, the highest number of patients ever treated with proton therapy in one year is 79.

I would like to draw the House’s attention to the situation in Germany, which has invested more than most in proton therapy. Today, two of the three proton machines in that country are being mothballed. In Kiel, €250 million was spent last year on a machine, but it is now being dismantled and put into storage because of a lack of demand.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Can my hon. Friend explain to the House what a proton machine actually is?

[Grahame M. Morris]

Probably not, in the very limited time available, but I can tell my hon. Friend that proton therapy is a form of advanced cancer treatment.

My argument is that the money the Department is proposing to spend on those incredibly expensive machines would be far better spent on advanced radiotherapy machines such as the stereotactic body radiation therapy machines that the hon. Member for Stevenage mentioned. There are other forms of therapy that are far more cost- effective. I might add that we in the northern region have no access to such therapies. Indeed, whole regions of the country do not.

The one remaining proton machine in Germany is at the university of Heidelberg, and it treats a maximum of 1,200 patients each year. The German Radio-oncology Society has said—[Interruption.] I hope that the Minister will listen to this. The society has said that

“for the vast majority of cancers there is no proof that proton therapy is more beneficial than other forms of innovative radiotherapy that are one hundred times less expensive”.

This proton debacle highlights the perversity with which the Government are running the NHS budget, and these questions lie at the very heart of whether we can trust Conservative promises on the NHS.

The Prime Minister tells the public that by April next year every cancer patient who needs innovative radiotherapy will get it, while at the same time the Secretary of State for Health starves dozens of hospitals and cancer networks of vital money needed to buy innovative radiotherapy equipment. We now know that money is being redirected into those two highly dubious projects. The Secretary of State needs to cancel those projects now and redirect the money into radiotherapy machines that will help tens of thousands of people in my constituency and across the country. This has the potential to be a monumental scandal and a waste of public money. I urge hon. Members who share my concern to sign early-day motion 773, to lobby the Health Secretary and ask him to reconsider his spending priorities in relation to cancer therapies, and to support the motion on the Order Paper.