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Health and Social Care Bill

It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning), with her deep commitment and expertise in health and social care. I pay tribute to all that she has done to help all of us in the House, without fear or favour, to chart our way through difficult and sensitive matters. We have had wide ranging debate this evening, as befits such a wide-ranging Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) called it a portmanteau Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has made it clear that when the Government are doing the right thing for the country, we will work with them. Indeed, we will encourage them to go further, where that is the right thing to do. In some crucial areas the Bill does not go far enough. Although we support it in principle, and do not intend to divide the House on it tonight, we look forward to developing the Bill to benefit patients and front-line health care professionals, not least by importing aspects of our own White Paper, which we have already published—although I shall, of course, try to stay in order. I am aware that Ministers have been provided with copies, which I hope they have read from cover to cover. We have published the NHS autonomy and accountability Bill, which, unusually, we will introduce during this Session. We want to include, at last, our proposals for a genuine patients forum that has teeth and independence—HealthWatch. We looked in vain in the Bill for the vision and the overarching transformation the prospect of which the Prime Minister, on taking office recently, highlighted. However, so far we have been disappointed, as was rightly noted by my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) in an analytical and powerful speech; I hope that we shall have his cogent participation in Committee. My hon. Friend was right to observe that the Bill is no testament to the Prime Minister's aspiration for a vision—if, that is, he is still looking for one. It is also worth noting that of 161 clauses, 38 depend on future regulations, the majority of which will be subject to the negative procedure. It is a great shame that the Government are too nervous, or lack the confidence, to bring forward a substantive debate on the Floor of the House on many of the measures. We shall seek to debate them in Committee, and I hope that the Minister will make available to the Committee in good time the draft regulations and examples, so that we can debate the best interests of patients and the public, rather than the leviathan power of the Secretary of State. It would have been helpful of the Minister to have started by demonstrating his good intentions and informing the official Opposition that he was publishing today—the day that we are debating the Bill—the draft section 60 order. He did not mention that to me at the briefing meeting that we had a few days ago. I hope that he will be able to make up for that lack of foresight. We might also note that 10 of the major provisions in the Bill do not carry an impact assessment, including the creation of the office of the health professions adjudicator, the health and pregnancy grant and the devolution of the pharmacy global sum to primary care trusts. One has to wonder whether the Government think so little of their own policies that the impact is not worth assessing. More worrying is the question of whether the work has been done, and is available for scrutiny by the House. The hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) discussed cross-border concerns. As an MP with an English constituency that borders Wales, I am all too well aware of the complexities and difficulties, and the fact that citizens on both sides of the border often seriously feel that there is a lack of fairness in respect of the health or social care provision that they receive.