[2nd Allocated Day]

I shall not give way any more on that issue. [Interruption.] I was enjoying it too, although I would be surprised if the Minister was. I shall move on, if I may, to questions. As I said, there are many questions. The Minister said today with his usual candour and clarity that the vast bulk of health care will in future be delivered by NHS services. That is a new one on me—““the vast bulk of health care””. That raises two questions. Will he characterise what he means by ““the vast bulk””, and what he means by ““NHS services””? In a world in which we will have a much more mixed economy, with a much greater mix of public and private providers working under the banner of the NHS, it is far from clear whether those things will be provided through what we have understood traditionally to be a public NHS or through some new hybrid NHS that the Minister is cooking up in the laboratory at the Department of Health. The Minister said a moment ago that there were many amendments. He is a master of understatement, as ever. There are about 100 amendments in the first group, and a further 100 or so to be debated later today—part of the 1,000 amendments that have, extraordinarily, been tabled at this stage of the Bill, eight months after it first appeared. I will consider the amendments in three broad groups. The first group relates to the duties of the Secretary of State. The second group relates to the creation of the national commissioning board and the clinical commissioning groups, and the consequent disaggregation, or break-up, of the hitherto integrated and collaborative national health service, which is what we believe will happen. The third group encompasses the important issues relating to the cost of the envisaged Government actions for NHS staff, for their education and training and for their terms and conditions. In addressing all those things, as the Minister keeps telling us and as I have repeated, tone is very important. The Opposition have repeatedly been accused of scaremongering and misrepresenting the Bill in a cynical fashion. Is the Minister seriously saying that all the people who have criticised the Government and levelled accusations that this is a damaging Bill are scaremongering, because it is not just the Labour party? [Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that he did not use the word ““scaremongering””. His colleague, the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), used that word on three separate occasions yesterday, and I have noted the Secretary of State use it on several occasions. I have no doubt that, were I to read the Hansard reports of the Bill Committee's sittings, I would find that the Minister had used the word, because it has been very popular on the Government side of the House. The word ““scaremongering”” is popular, because it is what the Government think we are doing. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that we are, so perhaps he will get up and tell us whether the British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the British Association of Occupational Therapists and the Association of Medical Research Charities—the alphabet soup of medical organisations that have criticised the Bill—are all scaremongering? Do they all misunderstand the Bill? [Interruption.] He is not just talking about us, because in many instances we are raising the same concerns that those groups have raised both in detail and in broad terms. I want to start—I have not even got rolling yet—by stating in the strongest possible terms that it is the Government who are being cynical in systematically obscuring the true intentions of the Bill and misrepresenting our profound concerns, because there is nothing hyperbolic or synthetic about them. They are very real concerns. We feel that the NHS, as a national, universal, publicly controlled and publicly financed institution is jeopardised by the Government's proposed reforms. Not tomorrow maybe, or next year, but eventually and gradually it will be jeopardised by the new laissez-faire, localised, commercially driven and legally contestable version of the NHS. [Interruption.] The Minister sighs, but all those things are precisely what the new system is about. The matter will be tested in the courts, and the first things that we will test are the duties of the Secretary of State. We feel that progressively the national, strategic and equity-driven system that we have had in the past 60 years in this country will be undermined. Worst of all, we feel that wider society, because of the obfuscation carried out by the Minister, will only really spot it when it is too late. We will only really miss the NHS, as we have known it, when it is gone. It is particularly ironic that, at a point when many people in the House and elsewhere are thinking about what binds our society together and what are the things we want to nurture, how we bring about a sense of community, collectivism and mutual support, as well as self-reliance, one of the institutions that is the shining example in our society of all those values is being so profoundly undermined by the Government. Is that scaremongering? I do not think that it is. I do not think that we need to rely on our words or those in the medical profession who have criticised it. We can rely on the words of the Government, because they have been very clear about their intentions. They stated in the White Paper:"““Our aim is to free up provision of healthcare, so that in most sectors of care… effective competition stimulates innovation and… increases productivity within a… market.””" As the Minister of State put it on TV, ““We want a genuine market.”” As the Secretary of State put it, ““I believe it would be right for us to have price competition.”” He has changed his mind about that, just as the Government have been forced to change their mind about a lot of things, but nevertheless I think that it is legitimate for us to point to those as reasons for being deeply concerned about the trajectory of the Bill. The Minister opened his remarks by talking about the duties of the Secretary of State, which I will move on to now because they are absolutely critical to the debate. We believe that the changes to the Bill, even in its third iteration, will fundamentally diminish the political accountability of the Secretary of State. As with the competition issue, the critical change is one that has been profoundly contested by the Government, but we think it is very clear. With respect to the changes introduced after the pause, we think the Bill still places at one very large step removed from the Secretary of State the fundamental duty to provide or secure the provision of health services in England, removing the duty that was placed on the Secretary of State by the National Health Service Act 2006, the National Health Service Act 1977 and all NHS Acts since 1946. Initially, the Government were not at all coy about that; they were absolutely up-front about wanting to remove political micro-management, as they kept putting it, from the NHS. In the White Paper, they said:"““The Government will liberate the NHS from excessive…political control””."