Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

I was attacking them! I am sorry if the hon. Gentleman did not notice, but I believe I was the first person to expose the fact that on average the private sector was paid 11% more per operation than the NHS was getting for the equivalent operation. I shall take no lessons from anybody when it comes to opposing some of the daft things that went on. I did oppose them and I am proud to have done so. What is being proposed now, however, goes far beyond that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) who has a great deal of knowledge in these matters has pointed out, there is scarcely any evidence from anywhere in the world to show that a competitive system delivers better health care than a collaborative system. To ask the essentially collaborative health care system in this country to turn over to being competitive is a bit like asking the Meat and Livestock Commission to promote vegetarianism: it is simply not what people want to do; it is not their approach and nor should it be. It remains the case that Monitor is still rigged in favour of promoting competition. Let me point out—hopefully without putting my glasses on—that clause 58(3) states:"““Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to preventing anti-competitive behaviour in the provision of health care services for the purposes of the NHS which is against the interests of people who use such services.””" However, it does not say that ““Monitor must exercise its functions with a view to preventing competitive behaviour in the provision of health care services which may be against the interests of the people who use such services””. Apparently, then, there is a basic, intrinsic and fundamental assumption that competition must be beneficial and non-competition must be harmful. If the Government say that Monitor is neutral, it should be given a neutrality in respect of competition and non-competition. As I think the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) would agree, the unfair competition of some of the independent treatment centres was harmful to and threatened the services provided by neighbouring NHS hospitals. There is clear evidence here of problems within the private sector. I recall that, a few years ago, United Health—a subsidiary of the US United Health—took over three GP services in my constituency. It bid that it could provide the range of services for less than the local GPs, so it got the contracts. It has not complied with all the conditions that were set, but in the end, the primary care trust decided that it could not take it to court because it would be such a lengthy and expensive exercise and it feared that the PCT might not win. Not content with that, United Health recently announced that it was selling the franchise to another private outfit. It did not consult the staff. It did not consult any elected local representatives—neither myself nor councillors. Above all, it never consulted the patients. These private sector outfits regard patients as part of the chattels that they can dispose of to maximum benefit and maximum profit. That illustrates the fact that if we are to have contract-based provision of services, a huge amount of lawyer effort will be put into trying to draw up watertight contracts. What one lawyer thinks is a watertight contract, another lawyer will make a leaky contract by puncturing a hole in it, and we will go over to the system in the United States, where zillions of dollars are spent on court challenges or settlements with the providers of health care. Furthermore, there is virtually no major American supplier of health care that has not been indicted for defrauding federal taxpayers, city taxpayers, state taxpayers, doctors or patients—and sometimes all five. I thus asked the Secretary of State whether he would rule out giving any NHS contracts to any organisation that had been indicted for defrauding people in another country. He gave me about a page-long answer, which could be summarised as, ““No, he would not rule them out.”” We are thus talking about the possibility of European competition law being used to force our Secretary of State to allow people to give contracts to American companies whose greatest claim to fame is that they have defrauded innumerable Americans. I think that that is intolerable. I would have thought that all these anti-EU Conservatives would have found it rather embarrassing to think that European law was going to be used to allow fraudulent Americans to get contracts working in our national health service. All those things, however, will be possible under the system proposed by the Secretary of State. Many people—including, possibly, myself in this speech—will find it quite difficult to mount an entirely logical and coherent response to this collection of amendments, given their nature, scale and variety. Let me return to a point that I made when the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), was introducing the ludicrous programme motion. I believe that to make such fundamental changes to the national health service—changes whose consequences are, at the very least, unpredictable—by means of 1,000 amendments, albeit some of them trivial, and to say to people in the national health service, ““Your sovereign elected House of Commons has seriously considered all the changes that the Government are proposing and has exposed them to scrutiny””, is to treat the people who work in the service, and their patients, with contempt.