Economics is not about goods and services;
it is about the actions of living men.

MP Steve Baker tonight called on the community to claim control of Wycombe Hospital if further changes brought in by the NHS “don’t work”.

Chairing a meeting at Great Marlow School, he said he is “inclined to trust” health chiefs over their plans for the hospital, but urged people to take action if necessary.

via MP Steve Baker calls for community to run hospital if NHS plans ‘don’t work’ (From Bucks Free Press).

We had a good meeting in which it became ever more clear that we cannot go on with public services which are organised in a way that is not sufficiently accountable to the public. That’s why, if the NHS providers make a mess of the present changes,  I will be calling for local, mutual ownership of our hospital.

For more on the Government’s plans for public services, please see the Open Public Services whitepaper.

Via ConservativeHome’s Platform: Steve Baker MP: Accounting has never been so exciting:

There is a growing awareness that one of the main contributors – if not the main contributor – to the severity of the financial crisis was the system of accounting rules under which UK banks continue to operate. In particular, the culprit is the system of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), an EU-sponsored regime which has applied to UK and Irish banks since 2005. It’s something Howard Flight covered in Fixing the Accounting Botch here on ConHome and which I highlighted with a ten-minute rule bill, which appeared on the order paper for second reading on Friday.

But enough of banks and the institutional flaws in banking: following today’s statement, I have health papers to read…

This morning, I had one of my regular informal meetings with local senior NHS management. As you would expect, the present top-level political manoeuvring leaves senior NHS staff in a difficult position: how can they plan when policy is again up in the air?

Right now, the NHS is scarcely under democratic control. Whether it should be is another subject but the fact is that health is primarily state provided in the UK. You would expect the state to have a grip.

However, not only is the NHS out of democratic control, it is scarcely under Departmental control either. Before my election, I had cause to meet a number of the most senior Department of Health officials and the overwhelming majority began the conversation with, “This is not NHS HQ.” In then discussing how the NHS is organised, I quickly found that the structures are astonishingly complex and that senior staff get things done through informal channels.

So, here we have the world’s second largest employer, funded by taxation, and not in any meaningful sense answerable to the people who pay for it. Even Tesco answers to the people: we could choose not to shop there.

If that seems far-fetched, so is the notion that the NHS is under meaningful public control. That is what the Government’s reforms were about: getting healthcare under control by pulling the one available lever – structural reform.

And yet here we are: the Lib Dems seem to be threatening to veto changes which are, as John Redwood explained on the Today programme this morning, very much in line with the Lib Dem manifesto. We know why the conversation has taken this turn: their party and their leader just took a pounding. But Clegg signed the health whitepaper. He was fully behind these reforms but now there’s turmoil.

Why should the public or NHS staff tolerate these shenanigans? Health care is too important to be subject to politics like this. Whatever emerges from the present pantomime, reform should shift the balance of power from politicians and unaccountable officials to the public.

Only the public have the capacity and the will to ensure health services meet their needs and expectations. We should take the politics out of health.

A HOSPITAL in Wycombe directly owned by residents would be the “dream”, MP Steve Baker says, after presenting a petition on ‘fairer funding’ to Parliament.

As the Government put forward its radical NHS reforms yesterday, Mr Baker handed over a document with 1,547 signatures.

via MP’s hospital ‘dream’ after fairer funding petition to Parliament (From Bucks Free Press).

Before our manifesto was published, a draft appeared, chapter by chapter. Our plans for health appeared first and in some detail. I embedded the document in this website and it is still available online.

Here it is:

One of the tragedies of the election is that it was not, in practice, the first Internet election. Had it been, the many detailed documents the Party produced might have been read…