National Health Service (Licensing and Pricing) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2015-12-01
Topic: Health
Norman Warner (Non-Affiliated, Unknown): My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister for his briefing yesterday, which I found very helpful. I also declare a forthcoming interest in that I shall shortly be chairing a short-term commission to consider the approach to commissioning specialised services, which will report next April. That may well, in the light of the debate this evening, have some fairly uncomfortable things to say about the commissioning of these services in today’s financially straitened NHS. It is very difficult to argue technically with the points made by my former noble friend—still my noble friend—the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about this set of regulations, but in a sense that misses the bigger point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Patel I express my sympathy for the Minister. He is, to all intents and purposes, between a rock and a very hard place. He has to operate within the extremely clunky system provided for setting the tariff for specialist services in the Health and Social Care Act 2012—which, if I may say so, is one of the less distinguished pieces of legislation passed by Parliament. Trying to set a tariff using a system of objection thresholds is a somewhat bizarre way of doing it, even by the standards of the 2012 Act. That so-called new transparent system for reconciling the needs of commissioners and providers has clearly not worked. It is very difficult to see it working, not least because we end up leaving the decision on the tariff right up close to the start of the next financial year. If we want a five-year plan for reforming the NHS, that is about the daftest way to go about setting a national tariff. I understand why no one wants to go back to the 2012 Act and revise part of it but it is pretty bizarre, in a fast-changing world, to set the detail of how you negotiate the tariff in primary legislation. That is a fundamental flaw which we are now struggling with, as a result of that legislation. That is why we are getting into this tangle over the technicalities of this set of regulations If I was still the Minister trying to set acute hospital tariffs at a time of tight NHS finance and, at the same time, trying to prioritise community health services and mental health—as the Minister rightly suggests people are trying to do—I would probably be doing the same thing as the Minister, stuck as he is with this piece of legislation. I might even, if I was feeling particularly crotchety, go for 75% instead of 66%. But that is the fault of the system we have landed ourselves with, not because of a devious NHS England, devious Ministers or a devious Department of Health. We need to get to a different system. NHS providers have opened up some issues to talk about. It is certainly very difficult, in today’s age, to argue with the idea of a more open-book approach. But it also requires the open-book approach to take place further back down the food chain, before we get close to the beginning of the financial year. That is the only way these specialised services can look ahead It is true when I look back on my time as a Minister —this is where I start to part company with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—that there is a pretty strong track record of the big NHS acute hospital providers having everything their own way. Even when, as a Minister, I said that the commissioner’s view should determine the outcome, those providers went on pushing and pushing, way up to and past the start of the new financial year. Of course, I am not talking about trusts chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—I am sure nothing like that ever happened in Birmingham. However, let us be clear, that is how some of the big London providers, in particular, behave—not in our second city, of course; heaven forbid There is a long history, then, of big providers pushing the envelope on the price for the job and weak commissioners being unable to stand up to them and deal with them. We now move to a situation where that problem must be tackled, and quickly. We can quibble about the technicalities of the way NHS England and Monitor have handled this episode, but it does not get away from the point that the Minister made: at the end of the day, these guys and girls have to make the decision. They have to decide on a canvas that is much bigger than that being painted by the acute hospital sector We should be a bit more forgiving towards the Minister on that. It takes a bit of bottle to say that we are going to put more money into community services and give more money and parity of esteem to mental health, even in a difficult financial climate. That means taking some fairly tough decisions about how much of the collective resources you put into acute hospitals and specialised services. This is where commissioning must play its part. It may mean that we want a smaller number of providers for some of those service lines; it may mean that we have to concentrate them NHS providers may not have realised that an open-book approach means that we start to find out more about those who are less productive or effective. I hope the Minister will listen to some of those ideas, particularly the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, at the end of his speech and by the noble Lord, Lord Patel. We have a clunky system and we need to change how we set the tariff if we really want to deliver the vision in the Five Year Forward View. I hope the Minister will respond positively to some of those ideas for a new approach.