06.01.16
Lamb to pitch cross-party health and care commission
Former care minister Norman Lamb MP will propose a cross-party commission to review the future funding and structure of NHS and social care services in the Commons today.
Lamb will make use of the Ten Minute Bill, a tool through which backbenchers can make their case for legislation, to advocate radical change and greater funding.
The NHS Confederation’s chair, former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell, has written to the former minister expressing his support for the move – which has also been backed by former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn.
According to the BBC, Lamb will claim that the extra money promised to the health service during the chancellor’s Spending Review is still not enough to prevent the system from crashing.
“The reality is that we will either see the system effectively crash or we confront the existential crisis now,” he told the BBC. “This transcends party politics.”
He will argue that the commission should look at every possible solution, from increasing taxes to ending the “artificial divide” between health and social care – as already recommended by the Barker Commission.
According to the NHS Confederation, the commission supports the organisation’s own proposal to establish an independent Office for Budgetary Responsibility in Health designed to produce evidence-based forecasts on different health spending scenarios.
In his letter to the former minister, Dorrell also outlined four arguments he believes support the case for “a new Beveridge report”, something Lamb pushed for in his party conference speech last year.
These arguments include the need to develop new funding and management structures that ensure joined-up and tailored care and the need to consider how “the whole health and care spend” can be used to maximise value for money.
Dorrell also stressed the “artificial distinction” between health and social care, the implications of funding increasing at a slower rate than cumulative demand.
Concerning Lamb’s proposal for a commission, the NHS Confed chair said parties must work out an agreed framework that ensures “sufficient breadth of political and professional support”.
“Although there will properly be close political interest in these sensitive public services, the lesson of recent decades has been that there is more broad based agreement about both objectives and methods than is sometimes assumed, and that time spent working out an agreed framework on a cross-party basis is time well spent,” he said.
“Any commission or independent inquiry will need to support or indeed help accelerate the work to transform services in the NHS and social care which is already ongoing, following the publication of the 2015 Challenge and the FYFV.”
(Top image c. Peter Byrne, PA Images)