National Health Service: Sustainability

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate, which was so splendidly introduced by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Patel. We have had many conversations about this in the early morning in the Truro Room, so I was very confident that he would make a splendid speech, which he did. This is a refreshing debate because it has been marked by consensus. I single out the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and my noble friend Lord Mawhinney, both of whom, in slightly different words, made the case for saying, “The time for using this as a political football is over”. We need to work from both sides of the House. No substantial difference of opinion has been expressed so far during this debate, and I hope that I will not depart from that.

When I first entered another place 45 years ago I was a very humble PPS in the Department of Health and Social Security, where a very few Ministers—one in this House, three in the other place—looked after the whole of health and social security. When I reflect on that, I reflect on how far we have moved away from that tight-knit and rather efficiently run pattern. Of course, we now have a much larger population and a much larger surviving population. When I entered the other place I did not have a single constituent with artificial knees or hips, or with a transplant. I even wrote to those who attained the age of 80, which would not be possible now. We have moved on.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, reminded us, it is well over 70 years since Beveridge, and 67 years since the NHS came into being. The sort of commission or inquiry which has been called for today is therefore desperately overdue. It is not the first time that a commission has been called for in your Lordships’ House. I made the call in earlier debates introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, in which the noble Lord, Lord Patel, participated. We need an inquiry or a commission, and I would favour the latter. It must be an open-ended inquiry, with an open agenda. Nothing must be off-limits. My noble friend Lord Fowler made that plain in his speech. All forms of funding must be looked at. We have to have a plurality of funding if we are to have a sustainable NHS. Whether the extra funding comes from compulsory insurances or certain charges matters not, but it has to come—we have to have a quality service that does not lurch from crisis to crisis, from one application of sticking plaster to the next. It is crucial that we attain that.

I have a great deal of confidence because my noble friend Lord Prior, who will answer this debate, was himself very recently a notable and innovative chairman of the Care Quality Commission. I hope that he will bring the experience he acquired in that important role to his role as a Minister in the department. He succeeds a greatly loved Minister in our noble friend Lord Howe. Let us now, freed from the constraints of coalition government, have the sort of boldness that the Chancellor expressed in the Budget speech yesterday. Let us have a commission or an inquiry that will look at every aspect of the NHS and of care, and which will in particular look at funding.

All of us here believe in the NHS. There is not a politician of sense or sensitivity in any party who does not believe that. However, we must not be constrained by outmoded philosophies. We must look at the NHS and at the society it serves, and see what we can do to give it the quality service that will take us through this century and into the next. Today we heard the statistics; we know how many people will develop difficult conditions that need very sensitive treatment, sometimes for years. Many of the problems we talk about today were not problems when I was elected to the other place, because not only did some of the drugs and techniques not exist, but people then would have died long before they needed the attention we are now calling for.

I hope that we will have a positive response from my noble friend on the Government Front Bench and that at the very least he will tell us that he will have serious conversations with the Secretary of State on this. However, if it comes to naught, which I hope it does not, we in your Lordships’ House should establish one of our special committees to look at these issues. I know, looking across and around the Chamber, that we have enough expertise; many of the people who could contribute to such a committee have spoken today. This problem will not go away. It must be addressed, and we must make sure that it is. A commission and inquiry is an idea whose time has come, and we must ensure that it happens.