Nurses for Reform Blog

There have been a number of articles in the press over recent days about the leaking of government plans to abolish almost 200 Quangos. For me the most interesting is this article from the Daily Mail debating whether the quangos will really go or whether this is just a public relations exercise.

We know that the government have already bottled out and not followed through with plans to abolish the Food Standards Agency.  Will we find in the months and years to come that many of the quangos have merely been absorbed in to other bodies and that the only casualties will have been a few little groups that meet a couple of times a year and cost almost nothing, as predicted by Dan Lewis of the Economic Policy Centre?

I know for a fact there are people who work for organisations like the Health Protection Agency (one of the quangos supposedly under threat) who are confident that nothing bad will happen to them and that at most they will be merged in to some other public health body.

Only time will tell if this government really has the will to reform the quango system or whether they will bottle out and provide us with more spin and no real cost cutting.

This article clearly demonstrates that the UKs parents and indeed many teachers, do not believe that the state is providing the education that they want for their children.  The demand to be allowed to set up free schools has been far greater than expected.

NFR believes that the Coalition Government should not just stop at schools, hospitals should be next in line.  As I have written before, local planning laws must be changed to allow much greater diversity of provision.  Hospitals could be set up for example by private companies, mutuals, charities, patient groups etc and they should also be able to take over failing NHS hospitals and to compete for care for and treat NHS patients.

With the election out of the way and a new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government it will be interesting to see how the NHS actually fares given the size of the burgeoning national debt.

While Conservatives are often thought of as free marketeers and Lib-Dems are often thought of as being a bit lefty the rise of the so-called Orange Book Crowd in the Lib-Dems over recent years could make for interesting politics.  For the Orange Bookers are often not only more socially liberal than the most libertarian of Tories but they are more free-market than many Thatcherites.  While the NHS will suffer some cuts over the course of this parliament NFR believes that more complimentary private funding schemes could well come on to the radar screen of both the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems over the next five to ten years.

Watch this space…