Freedom works.

Outside Wycombe Hospital

A crucial public consultation on the future of Wycombe Hospital began on 16 January. It is being run by Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs Wycombe Hospital. This is our chance to have our say on proposals to change how NHS services are provided in High Wycombe.

The exercise runs until 16 April and there are consultation meetings scheduled throughout the area every week in February. I urge everyone who cares about the future of our hospital to take part.

Click here for an explanation of the proposed changes and the schedule of public consultation meetings you can attend.

Ever since I was first selected  as the Conservative candidate for Wycombe, I have been working hard with local supporters of Wycombe Hospital. We are all keen to see services in the hands of the community and removed from further creeping centralisation and losses of service provision. So I welcome the Government’s intent in these current health reforms, which aim to move all NHS Trusts to NHS Foundation Trust status by April 2014 and to pass responsibility for purchasing patient care from Primary Care Trusts to the newly formed GP consortia a year before that.

This is a continuation of Labour Policy under the Blair government. NHS Foundation Trusts were introduced by Labour in the 2003 Health and Social Care Act as legally independent public benefit corporations. They are: 

• Authorised and regulated by an independent regulator, known as Monitor;
• Accountable to their local communities through a system of local ownership with members and elected governors – the governors being elected by the members;
• Not required to break even each year although they must be financially viable. They can borrow money within limits set by the regulator, retain surpluses and decide on service development for their local populations;
• Free from central government control and strategic health authority performance management; and
• Required to lay their annual reports and accounts before Parliament each year.

There was a move to switch to Foundation status in Bucks during 2008 that was unsuccessful due to financial constraints. This initiative will be revived and a new submission is to be made in September 2012. I would encourage members of the public to support this move to Foundation status so that local people, as members and governors, can have much more direct control over Buckinghamshire hospitals.

My concerns are that Foundation Trusts may become too large and controlled from remote centres. That would be the opposite of both the Government’s vision and my own of a devolved and cooperative local arrangement. We need to avoid the bureaucracy and lack of accountability which has plagued the NHS locally for so long.

In the meantime, I again urge everyone interested in future of health provision in Wycombe to join in the consultation process. NHS consultations are currently how local voices are heard and I think it vital that hundreds of local people take part.

The Government’s aid policy is controversial but those local charities and charitable institutions who seek to help those in need overseas may wish to take advantage of DFID’s  Global Poverty Action Fund:

The Global Poverty Action Fund (GPAF) was launched on 27 October 2010. It is a demand-led fund supporting projects focused on poverty reduction and pursuit of the MDGs through tangible changes to poor people’s lives including through: service delivery, empowerment and accountability and work on conflict, security and justice. Projects will be selected on the basis of demonstrable impact on poverty, clarity of outputs and outcomes, and value for money.

Read more: DFID – Global Poverty Action Fund.

As I have indicated before Entrepreneurship and opportunity are the primary keys to prosperity. I hope projects will recognise that business is development and direct themselves to that end but of course there are many immediate needs for the relief of abject poverty.

Back in November, I mentioned the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund in debate and I recently had the pleasure of meeting Paul Hewson, the Fund’s Regional Director for London, Home Counties and South England.

As it says on the Fund’s site:

We are the RAF’s leading welfare charity providing practical, financial and – in some cases – emotional support to all members of the RAF family, from childhood through to old age. We help with issues from childcare and relationship difficulties to injury and disability, and from financial hardship and debt to illness and bereavement.

The Benevolent Fund is a fantastic organisation, funded entirely by voluntary donations, including from serving people, who often give half a day’s pay a year to help their fellows. It’s a great testament to the spirit of the Royal Air Force that the Fund is able to provide a wide range of help to the entire RAF family without calling on taxpayer support.

There’s the Big Society in action: people choosing freely to provide for one another. It’s not a concept which belongs to any particular political party or group. It is simply community at its best.

Makes me proud to have served.

If you think there really is a big idea behind the Big Society, then you agree with the unlikely pairing of Jon Cruddas (Lab, Dagenham) and Jesse Norman (Con, Hereford). The latter’s new book, The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics, attempts the seemingly impossible task of providing a grand philosophical narrative to underscore David Cameron’s often amorphous rhetoric.

via The Big Society is a threat to Labour | The Spectator. See also my Surely the Big Society is about more than volunteering?

I believe we are entering a period of “both/and” in society: we are both individuals and in society…

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

— Nock, Our Enemy, The State