Campaign reply - vote against the Health & Care Bill

Thank you for contacting my office. I very much appreciate you getting in touch about the Health & Care Bill.

While I appreciate your opposition to the Bill, I would like to provide you with my reasoning behind voting for this key milestone in the health system in England.

I am pleased this Act will help reduce bureaucracy, strengthen integration, boost accountability, and deliver on our ambitious agenda for change. In short, it has equipped the NHS with much of the legislative framework it needs to be fit for the future.

We are not only recovering from the pandemic but learning from it, and the principles that underpin the Act have never been more important. It will form the bedrock for the NHS to build on in the years ahead.

The Act will improve health and care services in many important ways.

• We have required the inclusion of cancer outcome objectives in the NHS mandate, helping to boost survival rates and improve outcomes for over 300,000 people a year who are diagnosed with cancer.
• We have banned the abhorrent practice of hymenoplasty and virginity testing, protecting and safeguarding vulnerable women and girls.
• We have paved the way for a licensing regime for non-surgical cosmetic procedures, cracking down on the unregulated aesthetics industry and protecting patients from the physical and mental harms that come with botched cosmetic procedures.
• We have further demonstrated the UK’s leading role as an opponent of organ trafficking, by making it a criminal offence to give or receive payment for an organ outside the UK.
• We have made important commitments on the safeguarding of children, and required Integrated Care Boards to set out any proposed steps to address the particular needs of victims of abuse.
• We have provided for the establishment of Integrated Care Boards and Integrated Care Partnerships, strengthening partnerships between the NHS and local authorities and improving integration and collaboration across the health system.
• We have supported parity of esteem across physical and mental health, to support the mental health and wellbeing of everyone, and to ensure that the right support is in place for all.
• We have made clear the NHS’s duties to commission palliative care, ensuring that people of all ages can benefit from high quality personalised palliative and end of life care if and when they need it.
• We have introduced measures to ensure that our health and social care workforce have the right skills and knowledge to provide informed care to autistic people and people with a learning disability by making specialised training mandatory by law.
• We are making services safer by establishing the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, an independent public body which will investigate incidents that have implications for patient safety and help improve systems and practices.
• We have announced a plan for adult social care that will protect individuals and families against unpredictable and potentially catastrophic care costs.
• We’ve placed a duty on government to publish a report detailing our workforce planning and our plan to deliver it. We have commissioned Health Education England to develop a long-term strategic framework, looking at trends across our workforce. We have also commissioned NHS England and Improvement to develop a long-term workforce strategy.
• We have introduced further measures to tackle health disparities, placing duties on ICBs and NHS England to reduce health disparities and making health disparities a key component of the wider duties NHS bodies must consider when making any decisions.
• We have given the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care the power to directly introduce, vary or terminate water fluoridation schemes, with a view to ensuring more of the population benefit from fluoridation, which we know reduces oral health disparities and the burden on NHS services.
• And we have delivered landmark modern slavery legislation with a view to eradicating the use of goods or services tainted by slavery in the NHS - representing a significant step forward in the UK’s mission to crack down on this evil practice wherever it is found.

We are continuing to work to a target date of 1 July for establishing Integrated Care Boards, and are working closely with NHS England and stakeholders across the health and care system to ensure operational changes are aligned with legislative changes.

This Act is a major step forward, but it is not the end of our ambitions for the health service. It gives the NHS the levers it needs, but we know that more needs to be done to tackle deep rooted challenges, which this government is ambitious and eager to do.

That’s why the Health Secretary has announced his vision for comprehensive healthcare reform, starting what will be one of the most significant transfers of power and funding from the State to individuals and their families in decades. Our programme of reform will prioritise prevention, offer more personalised care, deliver improvements in performance and back the people making a difference in our NHS.

While the Health Secretary will be setting more details in due course, it is clear that without the Health and Care Act we would simply not have the tools we need to make the NHS the world beating organisation we all want it to be.

Thank you once again for getting in touch, and if I can be of further assistance with any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact me.