Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Bill

Simon Burns Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Rob Marris]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady, who, as ever, speaks with authority on these issues. I am a bit of a centraliser, because I do not like postcode lotteries. We will already have that in a cross-border sense—between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—but it is a great deal worse when just some CCGs in England are making a drug available when it has been signed off by NICE as safe for use but it is not mandatorily available, and not every patient for whom it is medically appropriate can obtain it from every CCG. That sort of postcode lottery undermines the “national” part of the national health service, which is regrettable.

Amendment 8, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper), would ring-fence savings made through the provisions of this Bill and earlier legislation so that the money thereby saved, or paid into the pot by a pharmaceutical company, can be retained for expenditure on medicines and medical supplies. I hope the Government will support that. All too often we hear that Governments do not like ring-fencing, and I understand why: it fetters their discretion. Earlier this afternoon, however, I asked the Secretary of State for Justice whether the education budgets devolved to prison governors would be ring-fenced, because I feared that a prison governor who was under other budgetary pressures might not spend the money on education and prison education would not improve as it needs to. I was greeted with a very welcome one-word answer, which was “Yes.” I hope that, in a slightly different context, the Minister can give the same assurance this afternoon, because this is an excellent amendment which clarifies a slight gap in the Bill.

As for amendment 9, about which the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) spoke so eloquently, efficiency is of course important, but so is quality. I do not know whether the old saying “Penny wise and pound foolish” is used in Scotland—she is nodding—but it certainly is in my part of the west midlands. We have seen that time and time again with privatisations. When services are privatised they go to the lowest bidder, and what do we find? Either the service is not up to scratch, or, all too often—I think this happened when Circle ran Hinchinbrooke hospital—the companies go bust because they find that it is not as easy as they thought it would be to make a profit out of, in this case, the health service. That may happen to other suppliers as well. Quality matters, and the national health service is not a commercial organisation.

[Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to what the hon. Gentleman is saying about Hinchinbrooke hospital. Might I suggest, tactfully, that he go and look at that hospital? Patients in Huntingdon would say that the hospital had vastly improved, but because of the conditions, it was not possible to make a financial success of it. The company did not go bust; it decided to withdraw. However, in the view of the patients who used it, the quality of the care provided by what had been a failing hospital had vastly improved. Moreover, the trade unions agreed to the deal that was done to put Circle there.

[Rob Marris]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for making my point for me. This is about quality; it is not just about price. That company got its price wrong. It said that it could provide a quality for a certain price, and it did provide the quality but not for that price, and it jacked the contract in.

[Sir Simon Burns]

I think that what the hon. Gentleman said at the beginning of his comments on Hinchinbrooke —we will know for certain when we see the Official Report tomorrow—showed that he was using that example inaccurately to make a point about privatisation. He said that privatisation caused quality to go down, but that in this case the company had gone bust. He was wrong on both counts.

[Rob Marris]

The right hon. Gentleman may well be correct on that specific point, and I fully accept that. There is in privatisations, however, a nexus between quality and price, and very often—although not always—the companies that promise a quality at a certain price are unable to deliver it. They cannot deliver the quality of service, and/or they cannot do so at the price at which they promised to do so. He can correct me on this if he wishes, but we see that time and again when rail franchisees come back to the Government and say, “We promised a certain level of service for a certain price. We cannot do it: we need a bigger bung.”