Lord Owen attacks NHS reform bill

David Cameron should sack Andrew Lansley, his health secretary, and other health ministers over the government’s “fatally flawed” National Health Service bill, according to Lord Owen, the former leader of the Social Democratic party and a Labour health minister in the 1970s.

In an intervention that further raises the political temperature around Mr Lansley’s reforms, the medically qualified peer says the House of Lords will feel free to amend the bill substantially because “the coalition lacks a mandate for many of the policies set out in the bill”.

The Lords could vote to put it into a select committee, he says in a pamphlet published on Thursday, which would significantly delay its progress. Further amendments by the Lords could put David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the position of having to delay the bill for a year or more, or use significant political capital to force it through.

In the late 1980s, Dr Owen backed the then-Conservative government’s plans for an internal market in the NHS, which saw the purchase of care separated from its provision, the creation of GP fundholding, and the attempt to turn directly managed NHS hospitals into more freestanding NHS trusts.

But the current proposals are of “staggering ineptitude” and will create a “destructive external market” in healthcare, Lord Owen says in the “Fatally Flawed”. pamphlet.

Attacking the proposals as “incoherent”, he says they will fragment care, subject NHS services to EU competition law, and profoundly damage the doctor-patient relationship once patients believe “that the decisions of doctors and nurses are taken on cost grounds” that have been caused by “competitive trading”.

Simon Burns, health minister, said Lord Owen’s criticisms were simply “not an accurate reflection of what we are doing”.

Lord Owen’s intervention came as the British Medical Association said the plans to hand much of public health over to local authorities and revamp funding for education and training were flawed and “could damage the NHS beyond repair”.

In addition, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, has urged David Cameron to withdraw his “confused, expensive and reckless plans”, insisting the fate of the health service was too important to be left to horse-trading between Tories and Lib Dems in the coalition.

Mr Miliband said at the very least Mr Cameron should amend the legislation to “protect the NHS against the full force of UK and EU competition law”, reintroduce guaranteed waiting times and abandon the breaking up of commissioning into hundreds of GP-led consortia.

Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are locked in debate over how far, if at all, to amend the bill following the rejection of much its substance by the Lib Dem spring conference, and mounting public opposition.

Conservatives are fiercely opposed to the call from Lib Dems for councillors to be put on GP consortium boards. Dr Michael Dixon, chairman of the pro-commissioning NHS Alliance, said GPs would resist such a move. With the consortiums already answerable to local authority health and well-being boards, it would be “overkill”, he said, and would tempt GPs to walk away from commissioning.

Unison, the biggest UK trade union, has set up a mock Ebay-style site that sells the NHS off, while Michael Moore, the US director of Sicko, the film that attacked US healthcare, has issued a YouTube video pleading with the UK not to go down the US route.

Additional reporting by George Parker