This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.

This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Why can’t the UK government explain what its Health Bill will actually achieve?

By: []

Date: 2021-12

Today, the House of Lords debates the principles of the English Health and Care Bill. So I’d like to ask its noble Lords, before they assent to this stage of the bill, if they can explain what those principles actually are?

What is it that the bill, in a nutshell, actually does?

Explaining that effectively was beyond the health secretary, with the government’s own MPs reportedly baffled as to why it was undertaking a massive reorganisation of the NHS in the midst of a global pandemic.

The government tells us that the bill will support the NHS in tackling its backlog, including by promoting ‘integration’ with social care. But no plausible explanation of how the bill will achieve that is offered. The care system languishes, unfixed, privatised, means-tested, gate-kept, short-staffed, fragmented, unaccountable and underfunded. And it will continue to do so despite Boris Johnson’s promises and despite the controversial upcoming National Insurance levy and last week’s white paper. Demoralised NHS staff continue to leave the service and disgruntled patients reject the pandemic shift to a ‘digital-first’ NHS.

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The government and its supporters also like to say the bill is ‘the NHS’s own plan’, indeed its ‘Long Term Plan’, and claim an electoral mandate on that basis. Former prime minister David Cameron’s NHS boss, Simon Stevens, who is making his maiden speech in the Lords today, helped draft these plans, it’s true. But the British Medical Association warned in October that the bill will “do more harm than good” and that the bill’s approach to reforming NHS competition “risks making it easier for private companies to win NHS contracts without proper scrutiny”.
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