Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendments 129 and 129A in the group. First, I will take up the point made by my noble friend Lady Thornton about the long-standing problem of the slowness of the NHS to take up innovative ideas, and the frustration often felt by people in this country who have invented new approaches and created new innovations, only to find that they have had to go abroad to get them projected, promoted and sold, with the NHS being one of the last to take up the innovation, which was often funded in one form or another with public money by the British taxpayer. It is a long-standing problem and not a party-political issue; it has been a challenge for successive Governments. One of the most embarrassing moments one has as a Minister is when one meets foreign delegations or travels abroad to back Britain and is asked, ““Has this innovation been taken up in the NHS?””, whereupon one has to shuffle one’s feet and think of a suitably weaselly form of words to avoid answering the question directly. It is a very long-standing and difficult issue. Amendment 129 draws attention to the importance of the procurement of goods and services in the promotion of innovation, and to the duty that that places on the national Commissioning Board. There are many reports about the importance of public procurement in advancing innovation and in ensuring the take-up of UK inventions and innovative practices. The latest one was by the Science and Technology Committee of your Lordships' House, of which I was a member. The report brought out some of the dilemmas around using procurement to take forward innovation. Yet again it cast doubt on central government's use of their purchasing power and muscle to drive the take-up of UK innovations in public services. The NHS is not alone in having this problem, but it is part of the problem and it is a big part of the public sector. A major and long-standing problem is that too many purchasing decisions are taken too far down the organisational food chain, with too little intervention at senior level and too little willingness to use large-scale purchasing to spread the use of innovative approaches. Whatever else the national Commissioning Board has, it has a lot of financial muscle. It must use that, through the NHS’s purchasing capacity, to drive innovation, which often comes from publicly funded research. I hope that the Minister, who is well aware of the issue, will see the sense in putting something like Amendment 129 in the Bill. We cannot say too often that public procurement is a way of helping to establish and drive innovation in the NHS. Amendment 129A seeks to add the idea of an innovation fund to the board's armoury on innovation in new Section 13K. There is nothing novel in this. The amendment continues and builds on the proposals of my noble friend Lord Darzi, which led to regional innovation funds that strategic health authorities currently manage. Again, we need to strengthen the mechanisms in the Bill for driving innovation in an NHS that historically has been slow to take up innovations and apply them to scale for the benefit of patients. We are not talking about huge sums of money in the innovation fund, but relatively modest amounts in relation to the scale of NHS expenditure. However, an amendment of this kind would ensure the continuance of the useful work that has been started by the strategic health authorities following the promptings of my noble friend Lord Darzi. It is typical of what we sometimes do in this country. We start an initiative with a fund at strategic health authority level and then shuffle the cards so that somehow, along the way, some of the initiatives and their benefits get lost. I hope that we can get some reassurance from the Minister that some kind of innovation fund will be available so that we can continue the work that my noble friend Lord Darzi so ably started to ensure that patients can secure the benefits of UK innovations.