On 26 September 2019, NHS England and NHS Improvement Strategy and Innovation Directorate published the "NHS’s recommendations to Government and Parliament for an NHS Bill" supporting the NHS Long-term Plan. This is a document that provides additional details on the initial proposals of 28 February 2019, after the results of a public consultation have been taken into account.
Having read and mulled it over, I think a specific passage of para 96 (in blue) evidences two major misunderstandings underpinning the approach adopted by NHS England and NHS Improvement.
First, there is an improper characterisation of the rules in the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 as exceedingly rigid and as preventing procurement of NHS services on the basis of quality and patient experience considerations over price or cost. This flies in the face of reg 67 PCR2015, which explicitly allows for trade-offs between price/cost and quality considerations in the award of *any type* of public contract, as the contracting authority is free to determine what is best value / most economically advantageous. This also ignores i.a. the special award criteria for healthcare and other social services in reg 76 PCR2015 and the extra flexibility this creates, as per the Crown Commercial Service’s guidance, or academic commentary such as eg Pedro Telles and mine.
Second, the subjection of NHS services procurement to PCR2015 rules is attributed to EU law. However, this ignores the UK's unilateral power to exercise discretion under very significant possibilities for structuring NHS governance in a manner that wouldn't trigger those rules. This includes the space for in-house & public-public cooperation under Directive 2014/24/EU, as well as possibility of creating voucher systems underpinning patient choice in a manner that would exclude procurement rules (under Falk Pharma/Tirkonnen, see here).
Ultimately, the totality of the Sept 2019 proposals continues to ignore the origin and implications of the UK's domestic choice of structuring NHS governance around an 'NHS internal market', and solely seek to de-regulate rather than de-marketise the NHS. The same issues I raised in written evidence to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee regarding the previous iteration of proposals by NHS England and NHS Improvement remain relevant.
In my opinion, they should be taken into due consideration in the context of scrutinising any future NHS Bill. After all, the new proposals have cherry-picked from the Health and Social Care Committee's report and ignored crucial parts of its recommendations [2] and [7] (see here for more details).
Failing to explore all possibilities under current rules (including under EU law) and pushing for the mere de-regulation of the NHS could have severe negative impacts on efficiency and oversight of NHS expenditure. I submit that it would not be in the public interest.