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By Lord Knight of Weymouth - 16th November 2010
Lord Knight of Weymouth writes for ePolitix.com ahead of his question on reform of the Department of Health's non-departmental public bodies.
On Tuesday I shall be in the Lords, asking the government "what estimate they have made of the cost of organisational changes required to implement the proposals to reform the Department of Health's non-departmental public bodies; and whether the cost will be allocated to that Department's budget".
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, was quick to announce back in July that he was abolishing a number of arms-length bodies, with the aim of saving costs and bureaucracy in the NHS. The reported aim was to save £180m. The October 15th list then included about 30 for abolition.
In the debate in the Lords last week many of the speakers commented on the changes in the health area. Lord Warner was positive in general about the health changes but he joined Baroness Warwick, Lord Harries, Baroness Warnock, Baroness Thornton and Baroness Deech in raising serious concerns at the loss of the Human Tissue Authority and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). All were worried that these independent bodies, dealing with highly sensitive ethical and legal issues, would lose focus and expertise if absorbed into the Care Quality Commission as proposed.
There are also very real concerns that the Health Protection Agency will be absorbed into the new public health service, only for the same need for focus and independence to cause it to be reinvented in a few years' time.
So it is clear that these changes are being made at great risk to the effectiveness of some of these bodies. These organisations also charge for services and therefore cost the public purse very little in relative terms. In turn this raises a question about whether the cost of winding up and redundancy will exceed the cost of the organisations continuing for at least the rest of the Parliament. Lord Harries doubted whether there will ever be savings from merging the HFEA.
The NHS organisational reforms as a whole are estimated to cost over £2bn, and so my question seeks to understand how those costs are distributed, and whether the 27,000 job losses predicted by the Royal College of Nursing last week show that it is frontline staff who will ultimately pay the price.
In the cases of the HTA and HFEA I will be urging Earl Howe to follow the example of Baroness Rawlings, who announced during questions on Thursday that Ofcom is being withdrawn from Schedule 7 of the Public Bodies Bill and will therefore definitely not be scrapped.
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