RCSLT joins the Let’s Talk debate
30th May 2006
RCSLT CEO Kamini Gadhok joined a select group who attended the Let's Talk policy forum in London on 15 May.
Hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Labour Party Chair Hazel Blears, the aim of the initiative is to bring people from within the Labour Party together with service users, trade unions, voluntary groups and frontline workers, to discuss public sector reform in England.
RCSLT Head of Policy and Partnerships Nick Smith secured Kamini's place at this influential meeting.
According to the official literature, Let's Talk is, "a starting point for debate. It sets out how Labour's balanced approach of investment and reform has worked and looks ahead to some of the challenges we face in the future. The debate that will take place across the country will feed back to Labour's National Policy Forum."
At the forum MPs chaired table discussions looking at particular issues around public sector reform.
"The key areas they wanted to debate were how we make provision of public services fairer; how we improve our public services overall; how we can transfer more power to individuals; and how we can better tailor service provision to meet people's needs and guarantee the effective use of public money," Kamini said.
"For example, a debate around patient choice and Herceptin (the chemotherapy drug which, because it has not received National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence approval, is being selectively prescribed across the NHS) raised the complexities around the choice agenda.
"It brought up the fact that we say to people they have choice and can get whatever treatment they want, versus the reality of what is available within the evidence base.
"The debate opened up the whole issue around choice and what we mean by choice. As somebody pointed out, we don't have an endless pot of money and at some point we are going to have to have debates around what services we can provide."
Kamini said she thought the Government faced a dilemma in its aim to de-centralise health and social care, and the need to have a level of standardisation of service provision.
"I raised the point that it is important there are national and evidence-based standards to inform local modes of service delivery - which depend on the available skill mix, competition and the needs of the local population, rather than just costs
The Prime Minister joined Kamini's group during their discussion on targets.
"A director of social services spoke about her concerns that people are set different targets, because local authorities have different priorities from the health service. It gave me an opportunity to raise with the Prime Minister issues that came out of our conference on commissioning a patient-led NHS on 27 April.
"I commented that a big concern from our members was that children are not high on the priority list because they're not one of the six health targets. As a result there's a real concern that children's services are going to suffer. I managed to stress to the Prime Minister the importance of the integration of policy development at a local level across different sectors.
"He told me this was something the Government would be looking at by reviewing the work of government departments. He said he recognised that if they're going to make change happen locally they also need to look at how government departments work across and together around policy to do with population.
"The Prime Minister realises there are great examples of how good services are delivered and that the challenge, as we all know, is how we actually try and spread good practice. Certainly, he talked very much about the importance of moving away from a single policy approach to ways of looking at integrational policy across the sectors.
"There was also a very positive debate around the criminal justice system and I think again there is a realisation that there are huge issues around how communities engage with the police; how we get local populations involved in the debate on solutions to deal with local crime and how they can support each other.
"The Prime Minister concluded by saying that there needs to be a new approach to tackle the problem of people who are still socially excluded, in spite of the success of schemes such as Sure Start and New Deal. He also said the Government wants to look further at how the voluntary sector can support them and enable developments for the future.