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Independent Sector Treatment Centres

My hon. Friend makes a valid point, and I hope that the Minister will respond both to that and to the points that I have made. The most generous thing that can be said is that the Government have put their toes in the water and have tested different policy responses to determine whether they improve standards of care or throughput or cost-effectiveness. The York experiment is one such experiment and it would be interesting to know the results of it with respect to quality of care and treatment costs. I shall address that further in a moment, but on the face of it one would expect not to get the contestability that seemed to be the ideological underpinning of the initiative. I sought an update from Capio this week. So far, it tells me that the centre in York has carried out 3,306 out-patient consultations for NHS patients and has admitted 2,047 NHS patients for elective surgery—largely hip and knee replacements, hand and foot surgery, and knee arthroscopy. It gave a figure, in an e-mail that it sent me this week, of"““90 per cent. of patients happy to recommend the centre in our last patient survey.””" That sounds good on the face of it, but it also sounds a little like manager’s spin. I am not particularly interested in the results of the latest survey; I am interested in the overall assessment by patients over an extended period. I hope that Capio will make that information available directly to the public in York and, through the Department of Health, to the public more generally, so that we get a real analysis of the benefits and costs of the independent centres, as against treatment provided by NHS trusts.