Public sector union Unison said yesterday that the NHS Future Forum’s report shows a Health Bill beyond repair and that it should be scrapped.
The 40-strong panel of ‘experts’ yesterday recommended that Monitor, the new NHS economic regulator, should have a duty to promote the integration of NHS care, not just competition.
It recommended that the Secretary of State for Health should remain ultimately accountable for the NHS.
It said that competition should be used to secure greater choice and better value for patients.
The Forum also recommended that the deadline of 2014 for all hospitals to become foundation trusts should be extended.
Unison general secretary Dave Prentis warned that even if the government adopted all the report’s recommendations, ‘It is still the wrong Bill at the wrong time.’
The union stressed: ‘Really big questions over critical issues such as privatisation remain unanswered: just how will the government prevent “cherry-picking”? And why are there no limits on the amount and range of services that can be privatised?’
Prentis added: ‘The Forum is recommending sweeping changes to the Bill because it is riddled with flaws.
‘The Forum’s changes may airbrush out some of the flaws, but no amount of fiddling round the edges is good enough when the future of an NHS free and accessible to all is at stake.’
Prentis warned: ‘The government is using the Bill as a smokescreen to cover what is happening right now in the NHS. The £20bn that the government is demanding from Trusts in so-called efficiency savings is leading to longer waiting lists, patients waiting in pain for their operations and job cuts across the NHS.’
The Unite union said: ‘The NHS privatisation programme is still on track, despite protests by health professionals to the Future Forum ‘listening’ exercise.’
It stressed that ‘the pace of privatisation has only been slowed, not discarded’.
The union warned: ‘The recommendation that Monitor’s duty to promote “competition” should be removed in favour of “choice” for local people still leaves question marks about what this exactly means in relation to the role of the private sector in the NHS.’
Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of BMA Council, said: ‘The Future Forum’s recommendations address many of the BMA’s key concerns, to a greater or lesser extent.
‘We are hopeful that our “missing” concerns, such as the excessive power of the NHS Commissioning Board over consortia and the so called “quality premium” will be addressed as more detail emerges.
‘While we welcome the acknowledgement that the education and training reforms need much more thinking through, there needs to be immediate action to prevent the imminent implosion of deaneries.
‘Obviously, the critical factor is now how the government responds, as well as ensuring that the detail of the changes matches up to expectations.
‘But if the government does accept the recommendations we have heard today we will be seeing, at the least, a dramatically different Health and Social Care Bill and one that would get us onto a much better track.
‘There will then still be plenty more to do to ensure that the amended reforms do support the NHS and its staff in continuing to improve care for patients and tackle the major financial challenges ahead.’
