General practitioners have always been the cornerstone of our publicly funded National Health Service. For 50 years they and the community nurses, health visitors and other professionals who work with them have provided the excellent primary care on which all our families rely. Although there have been recent concerns about the development of a two-tier system in the new NHS internal market, the local surgery has continued to be the place to which people turn for skilled, objective advice, health service prescriptions, referrals to hospitals and most of the medical care that we need from the cradle to the grave. The Bill before us contains opportunities to develop those services and make them more flexible. But it also contains a major threat.
Deregulation can lead to privatisation.
This Bill is an enabling Bill. There are very few specifications about the nature of those pilots on the face of the Bill. New Clause 1 is designed to ensure that commercial companies who pay dividends to their shareholders are explicitly excluded from promoting those pilot schemes. They cannot become even indirectly the providers of personal medical services within the National Health Service. At Second Reading the Minister explained that GPs, dentists and NHS trusts, provided that they prepared the proposals correctly, could automatically submit pilot schemes for approval to the Secretary of State.