The NHS Reinstatement Bill is expected to have its second reading in March 2016. It would replace the current NHS architecture with a return to Regional and District Health Authorities. It seeks to address some genuine problems but it is the wrong solution. Nobody believes the Bill can become law but it raises some key issues about the NHS. What is important is that looking at such a narrow and technical issue should not be allowed to drown out more important discussions around social care and funding. There are no solutions any more looking at the NHS in isolation.
Trying to raise public interest in campaigns which deal with NHS structures is unlikely to have any impact.
The claim is that the Bill would prevent privatisation and reinstate the NHS; although few believe we have already lost our NHS – the public certainly don’t. Of course passing legislation cannot prevent anything, any determined administration would just pass its own legislation.
The only way to prevent privatisation is to elect a government that is against it. In Scotland and Wales there is no market but also no need for actual legal prohibition on the use of private providers. In the 1980’s when a structure such as that proposed by the Bill was in place the Tory government imposed Compulsory Competitive Tendering on the NHS; although it chose for political reasons not to extend this into clinical services.
The NHS does not need another redisorganisation. There has been no impact analysis but it appears that implementing the Bill would require the biggest ever top down imposition, far bigger even than the last one or the one in 1990s. Every part of the system would be affected. Over 500 organisations would have to be wound up and the assets (and liabilities) transferred to the new Authorities – that alone would cause enough arguments to remove any focus on delivering care.
Then over 1 million staff would have to be transferred into new organisations; tens of thousands of senior staff would have to compete for new jobs in new organisations; tens of thousands of contracts would have to be re-negotiated. Other organisations such as the over 200 local authorities would also be embroiled and an unknown number of private or semi-private providers. Doing this in stages would just make things worse. Every local authority would have to get engaged in lengthy discussions with all the local existing health organisations about how the new structures would be set up – scope for years of argument.
In reality across England reorganisation is taking place but through local initiatives not a top down imposition. By 2020 the NHS will have undergone a whole series of localised reorganisations under devolution and through vanguards projects. Some 50 odd schemes are already under way all of which flout the existing competition requirements. There is much to commend and much that causes concern about these schemes – and the risks are well worth a proper policy discussion.
There could be some reductions in management and administration running costs from removing the market but the claim that removing the market would reduce NHS expenditure by £10bn pa is not supported by any evidence or by any rational analysis despite thorough work by bodies such as the Kings Fund looking at the impact of commissioning.
There is also often reference to the experience of Wales and Scotland which have removed the market. In Wales the experience was that the first attempt actually caused much upheaval and increased costs – although the second attempt was far more successful. In both devolved systems the main aim was achieved although so far there is no evidence of major management and administrative cost reductions. But the systems are much smaller and simpler than the fragmented monstrosity that we now have in England.
Labour is committed to a policy to stop the privatisation of care services and where possible to reverse it. That policy was constructed in a way which ensured that decisions about how services were provided could be made without any external interference by procurement or competition law; domestic or EU or beyond. This was set out in the last parliament by Clive Efford’s Bill which relied on expert advice from those actually currently working in the relevant areas. It gave a solution which cost virtually nothing to implement and required little in terms of any reorganisation.
The Efford Bill did not remove the commissioner/provider split, but then it was never intended to do that. It has been rightly said many times that there is always commissioning even in Wales and Scotland; it is how it is done that is important. In the non-market system as proposed by Labour the nature of commissioning in England would change to one that was not driven by competition between providers and by market behaviour, so commissioning becomes more like planning and the internal market is removed.
So the NHS Bill will not achieve what is claimed, would be very hard (impossible?) to implement and is not really necessary. There are many policy issues to discuss that should get far more attention.