Editor's blog Friday 20 May: John Healey starts outlining policy ground for Labour

Shadow health secretary John Healey has given a substantial policy interview to Andrew Sparrow of The Guardian.


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Click here for details of 'Lansley: the NHS is not a mobile phone; I am not Henry V', via subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

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Healey has taken his time to get to know the subject, with a range of low-key activities. His Kings Fund speech has been selectively quoted back at him by SOS Lansley and PM Cameron, but remains a thoughtful piece of analysis.

There are some factual errors ("allowing private companies into commissioning for the first time ever" is plainly incorrect), but overall his interview is a response to decent questions from Sparrow (and some from Guardian LiveBlog readers), and it elicits a few choice lines, a selection of which follows below.

"Under the legislation, and Cameron's plans as they stand, ultimately the decision about who provides what is likely to rest with the new competition regulator or with the competition court. So it takes it out of the hands of either politicians, with elected responsibility, or clinicians and GPs, who are meant to be calling the shots in the future, and out of the hands of NHS experts."

"There is no evidence, as he (Andrew Lansley) tried to argue in that speech, that competition will produce greater integration".

"I see the role of other providers, including private providers, as supplementary, not a substitute for the NHS. As Andy Burnham described it before the election: 'The NHS as the preferred provider, but with a role for others'."

"As it stands, the legislation allows the commissioning job to be outsourced to private companies. That is the decision point about spending public money, raised from us all. It's the decision point at which patients are either given or denied treatment. That seems to me an area of health service responsibility that is inappropriate for profit-taking, when that will inevitably come out of funds that should be available for care for patients".

"One of the lessons the Tories should have learnt from what we did was that if competition for its own sake becomes the objective of policy, then you run the risk of getting policy wrong. And that's the basis on which the entire Health Bill is based".

"We are in the very early days of opposition ... I see my first duty as opposition, trying to challenge and stop the worst of what the government is doing on the NHS ... it's a tough fact of life in this early period of opposition ... that what Labour says matters less than what almost anyone else says."