Hunt, Burnham and Lamb speak in harmony at the Health and Social Care Debate
Edmund Stubbs, 23 April 2015
Earlier this week, the Conservative’s Jeremy Hunt, Labour’s Andy Burnham, the Lib-Dem Norman Lamb and UKIP’s largely silent Julia Reid attended the Health and Social Care debate at the British Library.
Evidently this was to be the ‘defining’ health debate before the general election. The Library’s theatre was packed and included many key individuals and representatives of the main stakeholders in British health and social care.
Although there was disagreement at times, with Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham taking as many opportunities as possible to score points against each other on key health issues, what was striking was the amount of issues all parties seemed to agree upon, including the objectives to be realised by all parties should they be elected. The only real disagreement was in relation to which party these shared objectives might best be achieved by.
All speakers seemed to regard achieving better ‘joined up’ (integrated care) as being a priority for the next government. All speakers spoke of the desirability of combining health and social care budgets and the associated responsibility for the commissioning of services. All also seemed in favour of the ‘devolution’ of NHS services (as was recently introduced in Manchester) being investigated as a possibly viable future model. Views on the exact manner in which this new devolved structure might be introduced, however varied considerably.
Reassuringly, each party representative acknowledged the undesirability of initiating any immediate top down re-organisation of services, holding that such a strategy could easily do more harm than good. There was even talk of a possible partnership for the promotion of health policy initiatives between Labour and the Liberal Democrats ‘on condition social care spending was protected’.
Concerns raised by the audience included the danger of cutting social care budgets only to thereby cause an increased demand for acute healthcare, the protection of mental health spending in real terms, and a the problem of how to provide sufficient GPs and A&E staff when training rates are falling.
Positively, the hour and a half long ‘grilling’ forced each candidate to abandon much of their prepared rhetoric and compelled them to be slightly more discursive about issues than each would normally be within a shorter time limit (although Andy Burnham still managed to squeeze in his now familiar image of ‘children being currently shunted up and down our countries motorways’ to obtain appropriate mental health care. It certainly seemed all parties had done their research and were well aware of the consensus of opinion as to the NHS’s future priorities amongst the health experts they were addressing; hence the unexpected agreement!
However, as ever, none of the politicians on the panel seemed prepared to fully admit that in practice all evidence suggests that no party is going far enough in its promised support if the NHS is to remain in anything like its present condition. All parties were eager to promise extra nurses and resources, to provide ‘hope’ for staff and inspire confidence in the public for the NHS’s future. Tellingly however, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm by all members of the panel to respond to an audience member’s observation that in fact the NHS would need all their extra promised funding simply to stay afloat, maintain current services, and avoid borrowing vast sums of money each year.
An adequate response to this type of question seems highly unlikely to be given by any political party until after May the 7th.
Edmund Stubbs, Healthcare Researcher, @edmundstubbs1