It’s now eleven days since the House of Lords voted against a motion proposed by the Labour peer, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, which was intended to strike down regulations relating to Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act that had caused alarm to campaigners when they surfaced in February. Following a massive grassroots campaign, featuring a petition by the campaigning group 38 Degrees that secured over 350,000 signatures, the regulations were rewritten, but those of us who fear, understandably, that the government is committed to the privatisation of the NHS remain deeply suspicious, as they were only tinkered with, and not, it seemed, sufficiently to prevent the key section, relating to an obligation in the regulations designed to put almost all NHS services out to tender, from surviving intact.

I described the outcome of the vote in an article at the time, entitled, “This was the Week the NHS Died, and No One Cares,” but below, to provide further details, I’m cross-posting the debate that took place that night, when important speeches were made by Lord Hunt, Lord Owen, Lord Turnberg, and Lord Davies of Stamford — and some important points were also made by Baroness Masham of Ilton.

There is much in the debate that will not reassure those who campaigned so hard against Section 75, and who continue to campaign to save the NHS from the government’s destructive aims — and the deluded machinations of its own senior management — but it is useful for understanding how the provision of NHS services is seen by members of the House of Lords.

However, before I cross-post the transcript of the debate, it is worth asking: what now? There has, sadly, been very little media coverage of the issues since the debate, but one useful article was published in the Guardian on April 30, written by Bob Hudson, a professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University. Read the rest of this entry »