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NHS Plan - 18 April 2002 Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): Will the Minister cast his mind back some five years, when the Labour Government introduced a whole new inspectorate system for local government called best value? That immense gendarmerie is now so complicated and complex that his Government are saying that they must start to dismantle it. What assurances can he give us that the inspectorate that he has announced today will not be such an enormous consumer of management time that it will divert people from the task of looking after patients? Does he realise that he has now announced a sort of amalgam of nationalised and local responsibility, so that nobody will any longer have the faintest idea of where the buck stops? Can he decide whether he or the people who know about it are running the NHS? Mr. Milburn: For once, the right hon. Gentleman is remarkably confused on the issue. Normally, he is a beacon of light in a sea of darkness on the Opposition Benches. The position is clear. We will not have three bodies inspecting and regulating health care in our country. Instead, one body will inspect and regulate health care to common national standards, whether in the public or private sector, in primary care or in hospital-based care. Nobody, with the best will in the world—even someone with the right hon. Gentleman's creative accounting mind—can possibly make that add up to more bureaucracy when it will mean less bureaucracy. The right hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that we must get the right
balance of national standards in a national health service, because the
last thing that we want to do is to return to the position that the Government
inherited in 1997, when there was a lottery of care for cancer services
and drugs. We have put that right. What we have recognised, as I have
been able to announce today, is that services have to be delivered locally.
We need greater freedoms and more rewards for the best. We must step in
where there are problems, but we must step back where there is progress
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David Curry MP | House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA | tel: 020 7219 6202 |
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