Opinion: Local healthcare decisions must be made locally

Should decisions on local healthcare be made locally? Or should a large organisation covering more than 3 million people be the decision makers, as the Government plans? To me, it should be clear that putting power into the hands of local people will provide better outcomes in our local area.

And that is why I am so concerned about the Government’s plans to merge our current healthcare organisation, the Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care Board (ICB), with Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. We’ve already seen how difficult it has been to get projects like the Wixams GP surgery off the ground, so I struggle to see how further centralising decision making is going to improve matters.

That’s not to say the current system is working well – as the Wixams example shows – and I do worry about the lack of ICB accountability. They are unelected quangos and can therefore evade scrutiny from the public and politicians.

In quite a worrying revelation, when I asked the Health Secretary Wes Streeting about this in the House of Commons he didn’t seem to understand his own policy. I raised concerns about the ICB merger, and he responded that ‘we are not centralising but decentralising’, but that quite clearly isn’t the case with these merger plans.

I have since written to Mr Streeting and the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to urge them to provide more clarity around the Government’s plans and the assurance that their shuffling of local healthcare organisations will provide the best value for money for taxpayers.

To avoid the failures we’ve seen with healthcare in Wixams, local people need to be at the heart of local decision making, and I worry the current Government is straying from that. If they listen to our concerns, there is still time to put it right and put local people first.