Streeting defends plan for hospital league tables after backlash – UK politics live | Politics

The Labour MP Diane Abbott has suggested that Wes Streeting’s attacks on NHS managers are a pretext for further privatisation. She posted these on social media this morning.

Wes Streeting’s cascade of abuse of NHS managers and medics is a pretext for further and faster privatisation.

Just yesterday NHS chiefs told Streeting they have not been given sufficient resources to meet his waiting list targets. They are right – they have not.

Demanding unreachable targets when funds are inadequate will just deepen the crisis in the NHS.

Here is more on the criticism of the hospital league table plan from Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. Boyle was interviewed on the Today programme this morning and his arguments were put to Wes Streeting. (See 8.52am.) Boyle raised three objections to the plan.

League tables is an interesting idea. Measuring good and bad performance is actually surprisingly complicated, especially since we’ve merged so many hospitals.

Back in 2001 each individual hospital had its own performance, and that could be publicly reported.

We’re now in a very different situation where lots of hospitals have merged into what we call multi-site trusts, and this makes it really complicated to try and decide who’s performing. So, for example, you might have a trust which runs three emergency departments, one with long waits, one with short waits, one with waits that are in the middle.

• He said league tables could incentivise “short-term target chasing”, leading to less attention being paid to long-term reforms that are needed, such as integrating health and social care.

There’s good and bad managers right across the NHS. It is good to have some form of accountability, because accountability is something which everybody within the NHS struggles to try and measure. So I think the right to try and do that.

There’s a difference between the intent and the way they do it. And there is a risk that this will demoralise stuff, and you will see that in poorly performing areas, recruitment and retention of staff, and that will go right down to clinical staff, will become even harder.

In an interview with LBC Wes Streeting claimed there were “lots” of poor managers in the NHS. Asked about opposition to his plans, he said”

Look, I know it’s not going to be popular with everyone in the system. I think people would rather sometimes that I got everyone around the campfire to sing Kumbaya and hailed the great religion of the National Health Service and how wonderful it is. But when it’s going through the worst crisis in its history, I think we need to drive serious change.

That does mean more support for leaders, and today I’m not only talking about more freedoms and autonomy for our best performing leaders, but investment in leadership, development and training.

But it does also have to come with accountability. It is not entirely surprising to me that people who represent leaders in the NHS are a bit nervous about that.

But to be honest, I think that there are lots of people in leadership roles in the NHS at all levels, from middle management to senior management, who are … giving the rest of the profession a bad name.

Asked if he was worried that league tables could lead to an Ofsted-type tragedy, Streeting replied:

I’m not interested in humiliating individuals. What I am interested in is performance, managing poor leaders on and out of the NHS. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing when the average very senior managers play is £145,000 a year. The level of responsibility they carry is enormous. They’re responsible for a vital public service, and if they’re not up to it in a very professional way, we need to manage people onto another future.

Guardian readers with long memories will notice something familiar about Wes Streeting’s announcement this morning about league tables for hospitals. Here is a story we ran a while back.

And it starts like this:

The government has revealed the performance ratings of every major hospital in England, naming and shaming a dozen trusts as the worst performers in the NHS.

All 170 acute trusts in the country have been ranked on indicators such as waiting times, staff vacancy rates, patient satisfaction and cleanliness, producing the first ever NHS performance league table.

Amol Rajan quoted this on the Today programme this morning. He pointed out that it was from 2001, when Labour was last in power.

Alan Miliburn was health secretary at the time. But he left two years later; Gordon Brown fought his plans for NHS reform aggressively, and the league table plan was dropped. But Miliburn is now back. At the weekend it was announced that he has been appointed as the lead non-executive member on the board of the Department of Health and Social Care. Welcoming the appointment, Wes Streeting, the current health secretary, said:

As secretary of state, Alan made the reforms which helped deliver the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS … His unique expertise and experience will be invaluable and he has an outstanding track record of delivering better care for patients.

Good morning. Wes Streeting, the health secretary (for England), is giving his first major speech on NHS reform, and there has been almost as much advance pitch-rolling for what he is going to say as you get for a budget. The Department of Health and Social Care has already press released three stories about what Streeting will say, starting on Monday.

• “Trusts could be banned from using agencies to cover gaps in entry level positions, and agencies could be banned from re-introducing NHS workers that leave permanent jobs,” the DHSC said on Monday, in its first announcement about the reform package.

• Pay arrangements for NHS trust chief executives will be changed so they are linked to performance, with “no more rewards for failure”, Streeting said in another press release about his plans.

• “NHS league tables will be introduced to help tackle the NHS crisis”, the DHSC said last night, in a briefing ahead of the speech today.

Denis Campbell has written this up for the Guardian overnight. As he reports, the plan for a league table of best and worst-performing hospitals has already provoked a backlash from NHS leaders.

Streeting has been doing an interview round this morning and he has been defending his plans. On the Today programme he was asked about Adrian Boyle, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, who told the programme in an early interview that league tables could “demoralise staff”. Asked to respond to these comments, Streeting replied:

There’s nothing more demoralising than going to work, busting a gut for your patients, and knowing that despite your best efforts you’re letting them down because you’re not given the tools to do the job, and you’re working in a context where … you’ve got poor leadership.

On urgent and emergency care, for example, there is a wide variation across NHS performance, ranging from 83% of people in one trust being seen within four hours in type 1 A&Es right down to 38.2%. That’s over 44 percentage points difference.

And what we need to understand, in those poorest performing areas, is that because of wider contextual challenges, wider system challenges? And if so, let’s provide the national support in to fix those fundamental problems in the system, so we don’t keep on in that doom loop of underperformance.

But where we have poorly performing senior managers, I’ll make no apology for managing those people out. Because people know – and this is the guilty secret of the NHS – there are very senior managers, who are paid on average £145,000 pounds a year, who are managed out, given a payoff in one trust and then reincarnate in another NHS trust.

And those might be the rotten apples – and I want to recognise that there are some outstanding leaders right across the NHS – but those rotten apples are unacceptable and give the rest of the profession a bad name, so we’ve got to manage those out.

I will post more from Streeting’s interview round soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.15am: Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, gives evidence to the Commons transport committee about the work of her department.

9.30am: Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, gives evidence to the Commons transport committee about the work of her department.

10.25am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, gives a speech to the NHS Providers conference in Liverpool.

Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

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