Coalition sneaking out regulations to speed up NHS privatisation, Labour says
|
Version 0 of 1. Labour has accused the government of trying to sneak out legislation to accelerate the privatisation of NHS services. Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said regulations tabled in parliament on 6 February without any government announcement would force all contracts worth more than £625,000 to be put out to tender. At health questions in the Commons on Tuesday, Burnham revealed the existence of the new public procurement contracts regulations, which he said had been “sneaked out” the day before MPs’ recent parliamentary recess began. The rules mean that from April 2016 all NHS contracts worth more than €750,000 (£625,000) must be put out to tender, Labour said. Non-NHS organisations, including private health companies such as Virgin Care and Ramsay Health Care will be eligible to bid. The rules could potentially apply to many thousands of contracts, which will be advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU). The change could remove the freedom of NHS hospital trusts and the 211 GP-led clinical commissioning groups in England, which hold local NHS budgets, to award contracts without advertising them. At present, contracts only have to be advertised in the EU’s official journal if there is a cross-border interest in them. Burnham told MPs that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, had tried to deny that NHS privatisation was increasing under the coalition. Referring to the “ideological privatisation of a cancer scanning service” in Stoke, he said privatisation “could get much worse” as a result of the new regulations, which are the result of EU procurement rules agreed last year. He asked Hunt what mandate he had from the public “to open up the NHS to private bidders across Europe”. The health secretary “wants to sneak these plans through under the radar”, he added. Promising to repeal the regulations if Labour is elected in May, Burnham said: “If passed, these regulations will mean that almost every NHS contract will be forced to be advertised across the EU, shattering promises [the government] made to protect the NHS from EU competition law and let doctors decide. “Isn’t it now abundantly clear that they have forfeited the public’s trust on the NHS and that five more years of this government will lead to a huge acceleration in NHS privatisation?” Dr Mark Porter, leader of the British Medical Association, accused ministers of failing to be transparent about their plans for the NHS, especially about the market’s role in delivering care. “Now, with apparently no debate, regulations have been slipped out that appear to open up most of the NHS to commercial tender. This will lead to confusion and a deluge of red tape, as well as huge administrative costs at the expense of patient care,” he said. “This sort of game-playing is just what the NHS does not need when it is under huge pressure from rising patient demand and falling resources.” The Department of Health denied that the new regulations would lead to every contract worth over £625,000 being tendered. “The €750,000 threshold is about notification when a decision has been made to go to the market, not about a requirement to go to the market for anything at or over the value,” a source said. In future a commissioner who had a service they want to tender worth more than €750,000 would have to publicise on the OJEU website that they would be doing so. However, that would constitute “a notification rather than an invitation for applications. The regulations aren’t saying that all contracts over €750,000 must be tendered through Europe. That decision is still in the commissioners’ hands”, the source said. Labour said advice from three lawyers had confirmed its interpretation of the impact of the new rules. The regulations will end up superceding section 75 regulations that were part of the Health and Social Care Act, which promoted greater tendering. The privatisation of NHS services has increased significantly under the current government. The health minister, Dr Dan Poulter, revealed in a parliamentary answer last month that NHS spending on private providers had risen by almost 60% under the coalition. His reply, to the Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, showed that £4.14bn of the NHS’s budget went to private providers in 2009-10, Labour’s last year in power. The figure has grown every year under the coalition, first to £4.76bn in 2010-11, then to £5.32bn in 2011-12, £5.67bn in 2012-13 and £6.55bn in 2013-14. The coalition’s Health and Social Care Act, which extended competition in the NHS and radically reshaped the organisation of the service in England, came into force on 1 April 2013. In his reply, Poulter said both for-profit and not-for-profit independent providers had provided care to NHS patients under successive governments. “Under this government competition between providers of NHS services has been pursued on the basis of competition for quality through a system of fixed national tariffs. Our position on who should provide services is taken to ensure patients receive the best possible services and outcomes,” he said. Decisions were taken by England’s 211 clinical commissioning groups and not by ministers or NHS bosses, he stressed. “These decisions are taken by the local clinicians, who are best placed to act for the benefit of their patients.” |