National Health Service (Licensing and Pricing) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2015-12-01
Topic: Health
Philip Alexander Hunt (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this interesting debate. We perhaps went rather wider than the terms of the regulations. I agree with the Minister that payment by results was brought in essentially to drive through reductions in waiting times by providing the right incentives. By and large that has been very successful, but we are moving, and this is a very good thing, into thinking about systems and how they work. There is a clear need to develop a funding mechanism to ensure that there are proper incentives for system-wide working, and I absolutely agree with that However, I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, my fellow former Minister. Looking at the Five Year Forward View, it seems to me that essentially we are moving again to a planning model but we are still stuck with the 2012 Act, and the two do not seem to mesh together. The Minister is struggling with these regulations because they are trying to operate a system that is still based on payment by results, when in essence we are trying to incentivise people to work together to produce a much more effective system and that is very difficult. If he were to tell me that the NHS amendment Act was to be brought forward, I think he would find a warm welcome in your Lordships’ House, but perhaps I dream too far I say to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that I do not disagree at all with his idea of an independent commission; the funding challenges facing health and social care warrant that kind of independent consideration. I say to him, though, that all the work done by the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust suggests that if you could maintain real-terms growth at 4% a year, which is the historic annual real-terms growth of the NHS, we would get a pretty good system without some of the pressures that we are facing at the moment. It is not a question of having to increase money to the NHS and social care hugely, but it needs some increase or we will be faced with the kind of problems that we have at the moment. The Barker commission, which was sponsored by the King’s Fund, shows some of the thinking that one might ask a royal commission to go into My noble friend Lord Turnberg mentioned the particular challenges of highly specialist providers, which of course are very much tied into the area that he knows so well: our whole R&D effort in this country and the link with the life sciences. While I understand the language of domination by specialist providers, we need to recognise that the link that these very same providers have with R&D and the life sciences is crucial to this country and to the lead that we often have in these areas. We have to be very careful not to undermine their financial viability because of the general financial challenge I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, is working on, chairing or leading this work on specialised services, and I am sure he is right that we need to have much more effective commissioning. I certainly accept that that is likely to lead to a rationalisation of specialised services, which will not be universally popular. However, if we can show that by doing so we get more bang for our buck, getting better specialist services, and that they are a better investment, clearly, that has to be followed through. I hope that we will see the outcome of that work within the next few months I have no problem at all with putting more resources into mental health and community services—I entirely understand that. However, the regulations are a pretty poor show, and in effect disfranchising the providers, who get 96% of the tariff income, is not the way to go forward. However, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Prior, for what he said. I take his commitment to rebuilding the confidence, as he described it, of providers in the system, as a very strong one. He did not quite go as far as I would have wished with regard to endorsing the open book approach. Does that mean that that is still being considered, or has it been rejected? Can I take anything from that?