NHS leaders want Theresa May to scrap Conservative legislation that forces the tendering of contracts for care, in a move which could dramatically reduce privatisation of key health services.
In the latest
long-term plan, which maps out the NHS’s future over the next 10 years, Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, demands that the prime minister repeals significant key sections of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.
The document, which Downing Street has endorsed, warns that the legislation, which was pushed through by the then health secretary, Andrew Lansley, despite huge opposition, is damaging the NHS and stopping it from making vital improvements to the care patients receive. It outlines how Lansley’s shake-up has damaged the NHS, which May has previously acknowledged.
If she agrees to unwind some of the most contentious sections of the act, it would mean “the end of automatic tendering” in the health service, said a senior NHS source. It would also means that firms such as Virgin Care, which has won more than £2bn in contracts from the NHS over the last five years and holds more than 400 of them, could no longer mount a legal challenge to a decision that went against the Richard Branson company...
The 133-page document says NHS bosses have drawn up “a provisional list of potential legislative changes for parliament’s consideration” following invitations to do so from May and MPs on the health and social care select committee. If enacted, these changes would “remove the counterproductive effect that general competition rules and powers can have on the integration of NHS care”, the document adds.
“The 2012a ct creates some barriers to
ICSs [integrated care systems] being able to consider the best way of spending the total ‘NHS pound’,” says the document, referring to integrated care systems the proposed as the future model for the health and care system in England’s 44 NHS areas. Repealing the most contentious sections of the legislation would also “cut delays and costs of the NHS automatically having to go through procurement processes”.
Stevens and fellow service leaders who wrote the document want CCGs, either acting alone or in groups such as in an ICS, to be able in future to apply a new “best value” test that would be designed “to secure the best outcomes for patients and the taxpayer”. That test would let CCGs decide who should be awarded the contract, without fearing that they may be sued by a private firm which had seen its tender rejected. Virgin Care has come under heavy criticism for suing the NHS after a failed bid.
