Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I agree in some measure with much of what the hon. Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby) had to say, particularly on the point that if we are to have good councils, we must have good councillors. However, the situation will improve only when we give councils and individual councillors more power in respect of decisions affecting their local communities. At the moment, we are falling some way short of that. If I may, I would like to confine my remarks to part 11, which in my view would bring about a radical change within the NHS. It would fundamentally alter the structure of public and patient involvement, most notably with the scrapping of patients forums, which the Government put in place only four years ago. Indeed, the creation of patients forums and the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health was hard won by the Government in the face of strong opposition in the House and elsewhere. The forums replaced community health councils which, by and large and in many parts of the country, had worked very well. It is therefore, in my view, disgraceful that measures to replace patients forums with local involvement networks have been tagged on to the end of what is already a long and contentious Bill that deals with local government rather than health. Indeed, the Bill does not even include the word ““patient”” in its title. It is almost as if the Government were trying to sneak these measures in, hoping that no one would notice. If that is the Government’s intention, they are, I suggest, badly mistaken because there is deep-felt anger in the country about how the Government have conducted their reforms on public and patient involvement. The fact that no health Minister will be accountable to the House for the measures in the Bill reflects, I would suggest, the low priority that the Government accord to the issue. It is an insult to patients forum members and other stakeholders that so little parliamentary scrutiny of this radical overhaul is taking place. I can understand the Government’s embarrassment, however, as their track record on this subject has not been good. Community health councils were scrapped and patients forums introduced about four years ago.