Labour defeated in Health Bill debate
pharmafile | March 21, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Commons, Lansley, government, health bill
A last ditch effort to stall the passing of the Health Bill was defeated in the Commons last night.
The 90-minute debate, led by the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, saw Labour argue that the government should not pass the Health and Social Care Bill before a risk assessment of the reforms had been released.
Labour said this ‘risk register’, which was created in 2010 but has not been made public, must be promulgated so that MPs can debate the full merits and risks of the reforms.
But Labour were defeated by a comfortable majority in the Commons late yesterday afternoon, and the Bill will now be sent for Royal Assent.
This is the final stage of the parliamentary process and is largely ceremonial – the Bill is set to be signed into law by next week.
The reforms are looking to remove the current Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts in England, replacing them with GP-led Clinical Commissioning Groups.
These will be responsible for commissioning around £60 billion of the health service’s annual budget.
It is also looking to increase the role of competition of services in the NHS, but this has been watered down in the many amendments made in the House of Lords.
Another key amendment made by peers was that future health secretaries remain as the constitutional head of the NHS.
There were fears that the current health secretary Andrew Lansley was trying to remove this role in the original plans, leaving the door open for the health service to operate more like an open market.
Tough times ahead
This will be one of the biggest shake-ups in the health service’s history, and the NHS is under no illusion of how difficult the task ahead will be.
NHS Confederation chief executive Mike Farrar, who speaks on behalf on NHS managers, said: “Let there be no doubt that this will be among the toughest projects the NHS has ever taken on. We have to find our way through the considerable confusion and complexity that has been handed to us as we build and stress-test the new NHS system.
“We need to heal the rifts that have opened as many of our clinical staff have debated the merits of the Bill. We need to completely redesign NHS services against a backdrop of unprecedented financial pressure, bringing the public and staff with us. We have to do all this with significantly reduced management capacity.”
Lansley will now have to deal with the fallout from the saga, which has left him wounded politically, and isolated from the very people he wants to put in charge of the NHS.
And it looks like these rifts will not be healed any time soon – earlier this week 250 doctors and GPs said they would stand against all those who voted in favour of the people at the next election, as retribution for the reforms.
Can Lansley survive?
There are now growing murmurs that Lansley will be ousted from his health secretary role in the Cabinet re-shuffle, which is expected later this year.
The reforms were very much of Lansley’s making, but his failure to communicate the ideas clearly – and his perceived obstinacy on watering down the reforms – has all conspired to make him the face of what is a largely unwanted change.
But a new face may be necessary to help appease all those professional health bodies, journals, unions and large numbers of the public, who have all criticised Lansley during this two-year saga.
Ben Adams
Related Content
Summer COVID cases set to reach 2 million with 10 million isolating
Analysis from the Guardian has found that over two million people could contract COVID-19 this …
Over 600,000 positive COVID tests genomically sequenced in UK
The UK has genomically sequenced more than 600,000 positive COVID-19 test, it was announced on …
Survey reveals over 2 million people impacted by long COVID in UK
A recent survey from Imperial College London has revealed that over 2 million people in …
