Editor's blog Monday 13 June 2011: Monitor and the CCP - the defining issue of amending the Bill

There is a potential game-changer in what may be about to happen to Monitor and the NHS Co-Operation and Competition Panel, if the Government proposes to enact what has been outlined in briefings to Health Service Journal.

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HSJ's David Williams writes that the CCP "will be made a statutory body, with the same duties as it currently has, overseeing patient choice, competition between providers and mergers in the NHS ... the two coalition parties opted to have a competition regulator specific to the NHS, rather than leave the issue to the Office of Fair Trading, but not to pass the duty to Monitor as a new economic regulator as planned".

This is the point at which you'd expect me to say that we need detail urgently on how the CCP will be constituted and funded, and how its chair and CE are to be appointed and sacked. So there I have.

All this detail will follow, and we''ll look at it then. For now, a few Obvious Things:

1. Monitor's loss of competition regulation basically leaves its CE Dr David Bennett in a challenging position, following his startling Times interview back in pre-pause February. It's also interesting that the mainstream media are now picking up, via John Pugh MP, on his deputy Chris Mellor's controversial background as chair of Northern Ireland Water: a story that Private Eye have been running for at least 18 months.

2. The behaviours within whichever organisation(s) end up doing competition regulation and economic regulation will be crucial. The staff who will want to work in those organisations are not likely to be intrinsic statists, to put it mildly.

3. The change to the CCP's status is definitely taking this Bill back to committee.

4. If the media speculation that Monitor will retain a role directly regulating FTs is correct, then it cannot be conceived of as an economic regulator at all. There is a vivid irony that the Bill intended to finalise the purchaser-provider split and finally disestablish the NHS from provision is inserting the equivalent of the purchaser-provider conflict into the very DNA of Monitor.