I entirely agree with the hon. Lady, who, as ever, speaks with authority on these issues. I am a bit of a centraliser, because I do not like postcode lotteries. We will already have that in a cross-border sense—between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—but it is a great deal worse when just some CCGs in England are making a drug available when it has been signed off by NICE as safe for use but is not mandatorily available, and not every patient for whom it is medically appropriate can obtain it from every CCG. That sort of postcode lottery undermines the “national” part of the national health service, which is regrettable.
Amendment 8, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper), seeks to ring-fence savings made through the provisions of this Bill and earlier legislation so that the money thereby saved, or paid into the pot by a pharmaceutical company, can be retained for expenditure on medicines and medical supplies. I hope the Government will support that. All too often we hear that Governments do not like ring-fencing, and I understand why: it fetters their discretion. Earlier this afternoon, however, I asked the Secretary of State for Justice whether the education budgets devolved to prison governors would be ring-fenced, because I feared that a prison governor who was under other budgetary pressures might not spend the money on education and prison education would not improve as it needs to. I was greeted with a very welcome one-word answer, which was “Yes.” I hope that, in a slightly different context, the Minister can give the same assurance this afternoon, because this is an excellent amendment which clarifies a slight gap in the Bill.
As for amendment 9, about which the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) spoke so eloquently, efficiency is of course important, but so is quality. I do
not know whether the old saying “Penny wise and pound foolish” is used in Scotland—she is nodding—but it certainly is in my part of the west midlands. We have seen that time and time again with privatisations. When services are privatised they go to the lowest bidder, and what do we find? Either the service is not up to scratch, or, all too often—I think this happened when Circle ran Hinchinbrooke hospital—the companies go bust because they find that it is not as easy as they thought it would be to make a profit out of, in this case, the health service. That may happen to other suppliers as well. Quality matters, and the national health service is not a commercial organisation.