Jeers as Ministers take scalpel to NHS reforms

The humiliating climbdown comes just months after coalition MPs backed proposals which drew unprecedented criticism mainly over fears of increased competition and privatisation.

Last night doctors, nurses and NHS managers broadly welcomed the changes although concerns are likely now to turn to their implementation amid warnings they will cause huge upheaval at the same time as the health service comes under major financial pressure. They will not now become law until next spring even though many changes are already underway in the NHS.

The move also triggered anger among Tory MPs who are furious at Liberal Democrat claims they had secured many of the changes, with former leader Lord Ashdown suggesting Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had “played a blinder” on the issue.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: “We have listened, we have learned and we are improving our plans”. But Health Secretary Andrew Lansley faced jeers from the Labour benches as he set out revised plans to MPs yesterday that he claimed did not abandon the principles of reform in his original proposals.

Key changes, detailed by Mr Cameron, Mr Lansley and Mr Clegg during a visit to Guy’s Hospital in London, include:

Nurses and consultants to be included on the boards of new GP groups responsible for commissioning healthcare services;

Stronger safeguards against a “market free-for-all”, with the regulator Monitor required to protect patient interests and not to promote competition as an end in itself;

Additional safeguards against privatisation and to prevent private companies “cherry-picking” profitable NHS business;

Dropping the 2013 deadline for the introduction of commissioning groups, which will only become operative “when they are ready”.

Mr Cameron said he now wanted to take the reforms forward in a “spirit of unity” with NHS staff.

“The fundamentals of our plans – more control for patients, more power to doctors and nurses, and less bureaucracy in the NHS – are as strong today as they have ever been,” he said.

It was “the whole Government, the whole Cabinet, the whole coalition” which had put forward the reform proposals and then accepted the need for a rethink.

Mr Clegg said the Government was making it clear that it was saying “no” to the sort of “free market dogma that can fragment the NHS”. The reforms would be introduced at the “right pace – evolution, not revolution”.

Labour leader Ed Miliband warned the plans still involved “a bureaucratic reorganisation that’s going to waste billions of pounds – money that should have been spent on patient care at a time when the NHS doesn’t have huge amounts of money to spend”.

Shadow health secretary John Healey said the climbdown was a “humiliation” for Mr Lansley.