Government to rewrite ‘confusing’ NHS competition rules

6 Mar 13
Controversial competition regulations for the NHS have been withdrawn after health minister Norman Lamb admitted they ‘created confusion’ around the coalition’s reforms.

By Richard Johnstone | 6 March 2013

Controversial competition regulations for the NHS have been withdrawn after health minister Norman Lamb admitted they ‘created confusion’ around the coalition’s reforms.

The National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) Regulations 2013 were intended to provide details on how government changes to the NHS would work in practice. From April, the Health and Social Care Act will abolish Primary Care Trusts and replace them with GP-led Clinical Commissioning Groups as well as opening up services to ‘any qualified provider’.

The regulations set out what a provider would have to do to qualify for NHS contracts, as well as the criteria for CCGs’ contract awards.

Both trade unions and the Labour Party warned that the rules could increase the range of services open to competition, and ran counter to earlier assurances from ministers about when services would be put out to tender.

The regulations stated that ‘an arrangement for the provision of health care services for the purposes of the NHS must not include any restrictions on competition that are not necessary for the attainment of intended outcomes’. They also outlined only two reasons for a health care contract to be awarded to a provider without competition, and these applied only for ‘technical reasons’ or ‘if strictly necessary’.

Lamb yesterday admitted that ‘the wording of the regulations has inadvertently created confusion and generated significant concerns about their effect’. They would be withdrawn and revised within days to address these ‘legitimate and understandable’ worries, he added.

A Department of Health spokesman stated the regulations intended ‘to maintain the existing position on procurement – which was introduced before May 2010 and is set out in existing NHS guidance and UK procurement law’.

He added: ‘It has never been and is absolutely not the government's intention to make all NHS services subject to competitive tendering.

‘But we recognise there are concerns about the precise wording of the regulations. We take this very seriously and we want there to be no doubt about what these regulations do. That is why we are acting quickly to make them clearer – we intend to lay revised regulations in the next few days.’

Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham called the withdrawal of the regulations a ‘humiliating retreat’.

He said: ‘David Cameron has been caught out trying to force competition and privatisation through the back door. That is why Labour took the unusual step of tabling a “fatal” motion in the House of Lords to stop him. We welcome this climbdown but these regulations should never have been tabled.’

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges also welcomed the decision to withdraw the proposed regulations on procurement and competition.

A spokesman said: ‘We are pleased that the government has clearly listened to the concerns expressed by the academy both in writing and in person to [health minister] Earl Howe about the potential effect of the regulations.

‘We now await the revised regulations which we trust will address the concerns we expressed and more clearly align with the assurances given by the government during the passage of the Health and Social Care Act.’

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