Not the right time for Health and Care Bill, says BMA

The BMA council has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for the Health and Care Bill to be rejected, arguing that it is the wrong time to be reorganising the NHS.

Also expressing concern about the wide-ranging excessive powers the Bill would confer on the Health Secretary, which it says would dilute public accountability, the BMA says that the bill fails to address chronic workforce shortages or to protect the NHS from further outsourcing and encroachment of large corporate companies in healthcare.

The association says that implementing wholesale reform while the country and NHS is still fighting Covid-19 is especially unwise when we consider the extensive backlog of care the NHS is facing and how little time doctors have had to discuss and scrutinise the details. Despite its title, the Bill does nothing to address the serious failings in social care that needs urgent attention.

Parliamentary amendments the BMA will be calling for include making sure there are genuine and transparent protections against privatisation, embedding clinical leadership throughout Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), addressing the ‘power grab’ by the Secretary of State and ensuring political responsibility for staffing levels.

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of BMA council, said: “This is not the right time to be making such widespread changes to our health service. What’s more the Bill addresses none of the problems the NHS is currently facing.

“Healthcare workers have led from the front throughout this pandemic, but the Bill in its current form undercuts truly representative clinical leadership. The BMA has consistently called for meaningful clinical leadership, engagement and representation at every level of Integrated Care Systems, including from primary and secondary care as well as public health doctors to ensure the right voices are heard when it comes to commissioning decisions, but this has not been adequately addressed in the legislation. The threat of private health providers having a formal seat on new decision making boards, and wielding influence over commissioning decisions, must be ruled out.

“What should also have been ruled out is extending the powers of the Health Secretary. Of course, the Health Secretary should be accountable for the NHS, but it would be totally wrong for government to have the power to abolish arm’s length bodies without due scrutiny, approve or reject ICS chairs, or interfere with local decisions – all of which risk political interference for political gain, and do not have the interests of the NHS, or its patients, at heart.

“We don’t want Government to stick with the status quo but it has unfortunately not learned lessons from the failures of the 2012 Lansley Health and Social Care Act. It could have restored a collaborative NHS, properly funded and staffed, publicly delivered and publicly accountable but it has failed to do so. Instead we have the wrong Bill at the wrong time.”