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Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen 4.46pm: Lansley indicates some areas where he may change the bill. Choice will only be a means to a better service, not an end in itself, he says. There will be no cherry picking by private providers. Under Labour, cherry picking did happen, he says. Private providers were paid £250m for operations that were not carried out. Lansley says local government should be in the lead on public health issues. No change is not an option, he says. The cost of administration must be cut, he says. Lansley says MPs know his personal commitment to the NHS. The NHS is in “a healthy financial position”. Waiting times are at a historic low, he says. The coalition is increasing NHS funding by £11.5bn over the course of this parliament, he says. The government wants to provide “the best healthcare service anywhere in the world”. 4.41pm: Andrew Lansley is making his statement now. 4.37pm: Here’s a short health bill reading list. • David Cameron’s speech from January on the need for NHS reform. • Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, a former GP, on why the plans are dangerous. • Norman Tebbit in the Daily Mirror today on why the government is moving too quickly on NHS reform. • Alan Milburn in the Guardian on the flaws in the government’s plans, and on why Labour should not concede the reform territory. 4.25pm: Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, will be making his statement to the Commons soon. As Downing Street said this morning, he will be setting out “the next steps” now that the health bill has finished its committee stage in the Commons. We’ve already been told that David Cameron is planning a “listening exercise” that will attempt to reassure voters about the plans. But we don’t know yet whether ministers are willing to make substantial changes to the bill. On this, Lansley should be able to provide a bit of clarity. 4.14pm: Greg Barker has issued a statement explaining his “cuts that Margaret Thatcher could only have dreamt of” comment. (See 2.39pm.) I was making the point that thanks to the mess we inherited from Labour, we are having to make very difficult decisions, much tougher than would have been imagined in the 1980s. Even Alistair Darling himself admitted that Labour overspending meant that they would have been forced to make tougher and deeper cuts than Margaret Thatcher. The fact is that if we don’t take steps now to live within our means we’ll end up paying higher taxes or making deeper spending cuts just to pay off our debt. Barker is not disputing the quote, but, according to a Tory source, he accepts that he did not express himself very well because he wrongly implied that the government was enthusiastic about the cuts. Labour, of course, believe that the phrase is telling precisely because it does reveal what ministers feel about slashing state spending. 4.11pm: William Hague, the foreign secretary, has just told MPs that the government has decided to communications equipment to the rebels in Libya. He also confirmed that Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan foreign minister who defected to the UK, won’t be granted immunity from prosecution. 4.01pm: Here’s an afternoon reading list. • Steven Fielding at Ballots & Bullets says Ed Miliband was wrong to suggest last week that Ramsay MacDonald’s second government favoured the alternative vote. The minority MacDonald administration certainly established the Ullswater committee to look into electoral reform. But it did so only because it was a minority government, one dependent on Liberal support. Having looked at the evidence held at the National Archive I can tell you that by this point most in the party believed Labour could proposer under First Past The Post. Many also believed, like the minister Frederick Pethick-Lawrence that AV ‘would postpone an absolute Labour majority – perhaps for a generation’ fearing Liberal and Conservative second preferences would go to each other, not Labour and ‘encourage weak-kneed electors who are anti-conservative (and to-day vote Labour because they see Liberals have no chance) to give first choice to Liberals and second to Labour’. • Paul Waugh on his PoliticsHome blog suggests the Police Federation is running an advert about the government’s police cuts that would be too hard-hitting for Labour. • John Redwood on his blog praises Andrew Lansley. Some critics cry foul at the thought that the private sector might do what it can do best and at lower cost. Taken to extremes, that judgement would end all private contractors currently working within the NHS. Some argue that the Lansley reforms are back door privatisation, whereas the PFI/PPP/private sector contract regime of Labour was somehow not privatisation. These criticism are not thought through. Healthcare in the UK is under the umbrella of free care at the point of use and will remain so. Beneath that umbrella there has always been a lot of mixed working between public and private sectors. Instead of being ideological about it, why not let patients decide where and how they want to be treated with the advice of their GPs. Haven’t we got beyond the yah boo of public/private, in a service which has many interactions and hybrids between the two? 3.43pm: Andrew Robathan, the defence minister, has told MPs that some servicemen and women who have served in Afghanistan will be made redundant. That was inevitable because 55% of all soldiers in the army have now served in Afghanistan, he said. Robathan made his comment when he was responding to an urgent question tabled by Labour’s Jim Murphy about the Ministry of Defence redundancy programme being announced this afternoon. Ministers have already said that people won’t be made redundant while they are on active service in Afghanistan, but Murphy wanted to know if any of them could lose their jobs after their return to the UK. Robathan also condemned the fact that information about the redundancy programme was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. 3.17pm: The Unite union has issued a statement condemning the military operation in Libya. The full text is on the union’s website. Here’s an extract. Unite the union believes the attack on Libya by British, French and US forces is wrong and should be halted. While holding no brief for Colonel Gaddafi and his regime, and strongly supporting the movements now developing for democracy and freedom across the Arab world, Unite believes the present military intervention is a mistake … We urge the British government to think again, call a halt to the military action and urge a general ceasefire to be followed by international mediation. 2.39pm: The Labour party has put out a press release about a comment apparently made by Greg Barker, the Tory energy minister. According to The Daily Gamecock, an American online student newspaper, Barker told a meeting: We are making cuts that Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s could only have dreamt of. It does not seem a particularly reliable news report – it says that the UK spends £150bn a year paying debt interest, when according to the Office for Budget Responsibility the 2011-12 figure is £48.6bn, and it says spending is being cut by 75%, which is also untrue – but Labour’s Angela Eagle has issued a statement anyway. While Conservatives might dream about deep cuts, for millions of families it’s more like a nightmare. From this week millions will see cuts to their tax credits and childcare support as well as cuts to services they rely on like children’s centres and libraries. I’ve called the Tories to see what they have to say about this. Someone is meant to be getting back to me. I’ll post the comment when I get it. 2.32pm: No to AV have already released the names of more than 150 Labour MPs and peers who are supporting their campaign to keep first past the post. Today they’ve named eight more Labour parliamentarians who are supporting them, including Rosie Winterton, Labour’s chief whip. The others are David Hanson, Michael Dugher, Louise Ellman, Steve Rotheram, Bridget Phillipson, Geoffrey Robinson and Lady Dean. 1.20pm: Here’s a lunchtime summary. • Andrew Lansley is preparing to make a statement to MPs about the government’s health bill. Although ministers have ruled out a U-turn, the government needs to announce some changes to prevent a Lib Dem revolt and mayhem when the bill arrives in the Lords. The statement coincides with the publication of a report from Policy Exchang e, a centre-right thinktank, saying the reforms are being introduced too quickly. Lord Tebbit has also joined the chorus of criticism, saying that he is worried about “the difficulty of organising fair competition between the state-owned hospitals and those in the private sector”. (See 10.14am, 11.10am and 11.26am.) • Ed Miliband has insisted that he is committed to NHS reform. In a speech highly critical of David Cameron’s reform proposals, Miliband said that the status quo was not an option. “It is particularly incumbent on those who believe in the role of public services in our society to be always seeking to make them better,” he said. (See 12.12pm.) • Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness have strongly condemned those responsible for the death of Ronan Kerr, the police officer. Northern Ireland’s first minster and deputy first minister put on a moving display of unity as they spoke at a joint news conference this morning. As the BBC reports , McGuiness said the dissident republicans responsible for Kerr’s death were “involved in a useless war against peace”. Robinson said the killing had “strengthened institutions, united our community and brought politicians closer together.” • Michael Gove, the education secretary, has claimed that some schools hide their naughtiest pupils and worst teachers from inspectors. He made the comment as he launched new guidance on school discipline . 1.16pm: It’s SDP reunion time. As I write, Shirley Williams is on the World at One criticising the government’s NHS plans. And David Owen is on Boulton & Co on Sky putting the boot into the NHS bill too. 1.04pm: Today the government and the Speaker seem to be keen to break the record for Commons statements and urgent questions. We’ve got five of them, in total. Here’s the running order. 1. Urgent questions on armed forced redundancies. 2. Statement from William Hague on Libya and the Ivory Coast. 3. Statement from Andrew Lansley on the NHS. 4. Statement from Owen Paterson on Northern Ireland. 5. Statement from Steve Webb on pensions. 12.12pm: At the end of last week we were told that today’s speech by Ed Miliband would be entitled “Public Services and the Promise of Britain”. But by the time Miliband delivered the speech this morning, its title was “The Future of the NHS”. Miliband said at the start that he was focusing on the NHS because it “should demand the full attention of leaders”. That seemed to be a polite way of saying “because the health bill is in the news and I want to have my say.” That’s fair enough. That’s what being in opposition is all about. We’ll hear what Miliband thinks about education and other public services another time, he said. As for the speech itself, it contained four key elements: 1) an assessment of Labour’s record on health; 2) a critique of David Cameron’s plans; 3) a mischievous offer to Cameron; and 4) a statement about his own ideas about NHS reform. The most powerful part was probably 2). On 4) Miliband combined a bold statement about the need for reform with very limited detail about what this might actually mean. The full text is available on Labour’s website. Here are the main points. • Milband insisted that the NHS had to change. In a passage at the beginning of the speech, he even adopted wholesale the argument used by Cameron: that reform is essential, because without it, the NHS will not be able to keep pace with demand. Let me say at the outset that this is a debate I come to as a reformer. A reformer of the state as well as the market. It is particularly incumbent on those who believe in the role of public services in our society to be always seeking to make them better … An accountable public sector, just like an accountable private sector, is integral to creating a fairer Britain. My argument today is that to do that, to create an ever better health service, change will be essential. The new pressures on the NHS are too great, the new challenges too large for us to think that preserving the status quo will be enough. • Miliband said that, as a result of Labour’s reforms, public satisfaction with the NHS was now at the highest level ever. • But he said that some of Labour’s health reforms were “badly executed”. The GP contract changes, for example, failed precisely because they reduced, rather than enhanced, the accountability of GPs to their patients for evening and weekend opening – although later reforms made up much of the ground … The frequent reorganisation of the size and shape of primary care trusts frankly did not take sufficient account of the costs and problems they caused. • He described the health bill as “a bad bill, built on bad assumptions and dangerous ideology”. At the heart of the speech Miliband set out a lengthy critique of Cameron’s plans. “On grounds that it doesn’t meet the challenges of the future, that it weakens rather than strengthens accountability and that it threatens the ethos of the health service, these changes are simply wrong,” he said. He was particularly critical of the impact the bill could have on collaboration in the NHS. The government’s plan risks fragmenting services into hundreds of GP consortia each with an uncertain financial future. Everything we know from around the world suggests free markets don’t work in planning efficient healthcare systems. Demand for services is less well managed and cost pressures rise … The defenders of David Cameron’s reorganisation plans will say that if NHS hospitals can prove that collaboration is in the interests of the patients, they will be allowed to do it. But frankly that is not a sensible way to run the NHS—an organisation of 1.3 million people. The value of collaboration is too important to our NHS for it to be reduced to something you have to prove is sensible to a bureaucrat in the regulatory authority. • He offered to cooperate with Cameron on an alternative policy. Urging Cameron to drop the bill, he said: “If there is a genuine attempt to address the weaknesses of the Tory reorganisation proposal then my party will enter into a debate about a new plan with an open mind, accepting that any NHS plan must be delivered within a tight spending settlement.” (I described this earlier as mischievous because it’s pure politics, designed to make Miliband sound more reasonable than Cameron. I think it’s safe to assume that it’s not an offer the government will accept.) • He suggested Labour would improve the NHS by strengthening national guarantees and entitlements. The passage about how Labour would reform the NHS was very thin. “Rather than being eroded, we should look at how we can strengthen national guarantees and entitlements,” he said. He suggested that there should be greater use of individual budgets for people with chronic conditions. And he said there be more emphasis on preventative medicine, on mental health and on the elderly. Perhaps what was significant was what he left out. He did not say anything about greater use of private provision or extending choice. 11.45am: I’ve got the text of Ed Milband’s speech on my desk now. I’ll post a summary shortly. 11.26am: Andrew Lansley is making a statement in the Commons about the health reforms this afternoon, according to the BBC. As Patrick Wintour and Denis Campbell report in the Guardian today, it is still not entirely clear whether the government’s concessions on the bill are mostly cosmetic, or whether they will amount to a substantial re-write. We should learn more this afternoon. 11.19am: Ed Miliband is delivering his speech on the public services at the moment. BBC News carried it live for about five minutes, but then abandoned him. I’ll post a full summary once I’ve read the text. 11.10am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here. As for the rest of the papers, here are some articles worth noting. • Norman Tebbit in an article in the Daily Mirror says that the government should not press ahead with NHS reform too quickly and that there are problems with introducing competition into the NHS. What worries me about the reforms however is the difficulty of organising fair competition between the state-owned hospitals and those in the private sector. In my time I have seen many efforts to create competition between state-owned airlines, car factories and steel makers. They all came unstuck. The unfairnesses were not all one way and they spring from the fact that state-owned and financed businesses and private sector ones are different animals. I have long been a customer of the NHS and although I’ve never worked in it, for 15 years I was chairman of a charity which supported an NHS teaching hospital (to the tune of £14million) and saw it go through the agony of a PFI scheme … One problem is that within the NHS there are teaching hospitals, often centres of excellence, which apart from treating patients, also have the responsibility of training doctors and nurses. That all takes time and costs money. Private hospitals are under no obligation to do training and do not have to carry those costs. Even worse for the teaching hospitals, if the private hospitals can hoover up all the straightforward routine surgery, like hip joint replacement, where can the young surgeons gain the experience which would allow them to move on to more difficult surgery? • Jason Groves in the Daily Mail says that Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that most people want to keep working beyond the age of 65 has been rubbished by critics. Ros Altmann, of Saga, said all the research showed most over-50s wanted to retire as soon as was practical. ‘There are terrible consequences for many people if you increase the state pension age too quickly,’ she added. Labour MP Stephen Pound said: ‘I do not see people queueing up to work until they drop – there is a strong element of wishful thinking on Iain Duncan Smith’s part. ‘Forcing people to work on indefinitely condemns young unemployed people to the dole and destroys the life chances of older people who have spent 30 or 40 years working for a productive retirement – it is pretty cruel.’ • Tim Shipman in the Daily Mail says that Chris Huhne has attacked politicians behaving like headless chickens over nuclear power and that this appears to be a reference to Nick Clegg. The [energy secretary], who is said to be privately plotting to replace Mr Clegg as Liberal Democrat leader, ridiculed his suggestion that the meltdown at the Fukushima reactor could lead to soaring costs of nuclear power stations in the UK … In what appeared to be a calculated attempt to undermine the man who beat him to the party leadership, Mr Huhne told Radio 5′s Pienaar’s Politics: ‘I think that those countries which are running around at the moment with their politicians like chickens without heads, that’s not a sensible approach. ‘What we don’t know yet, because obviously it’s very recent, is what the full implications are going to be of Fukushima. ‘I don’t think it’s helpful at this stage to rush to judgements or to jump to conclusions.’ • Roland Watson in the Times (paywall) says elected peers will serve single terms of 15 years in a slimmed-down chamber of 300 under Nick Clegg’s plans for Lords reform. Instead of a fully elected chamber that was promised in the Liberal Democrat manifesto in the event that party took sole power, Nick Clegg will soon present plans for one that is 80 per cent elected and 20 per cent appointed. He has also bowed to pressure from the Church of England and reserved places for some Anglican Bishops, although many fewer than the 26 who sit on the red benches now. Mr Clegg’s blueprint for a transformed Lords was promised last year. It is now expected next month. • Mary Ann Seighart in the Independent says that Ed Miliband oscillates between being useless and being excellent. But at least he treats colleagues well. Take the example of Alan Johnson. The former home secretary had supported David Miliband for leader, but was called in by Ed the day after the leadership election. Johnson didn’t shake his hand or congratulate him, but instead told him everything he was angry about and warned him not to appoint Nick Brown, one of the Gordon mafia, to be Labour Chief Whip. Johnson was pleasantly surprised when Ed said, “I know you supported David, but you must come in and tell me frankly when you’re worried about how things are going.” Johnson was then amazed to be appointed shadow Chancellor, a job he hadn’t even wanted. (Ed Balls, the man who did want it, desperately, sat next to Johnson in the Shadow Cabinet and, for the first few meetings, refused to speak to him.) Miliband followed Johnson’s advice and insisted that Nick Brown stand down as Chief Whip, a brave and sensible move, as the alternative would have been to endure a rival powerbase in the parliamentary party. He also sounded out James Purnell and Charlie Falconer – clever, Blairite former cabinet ministers who had supported David for leader – to be his chief of staff. Unfortunately for him, both said no. • Boris Johnson in his Daily Telegraph column reports on an encounter at a London tennis court with Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband’s new communications director. Now I want you to know that I didn’t intend to earwig on the private conversation of Labour’s chief spin doctor. I just happened to be near the path on which he happened to be walking, and though I don’t think he had spotted me, I could not help hearing what he said. “OK, OK,” said the top Labour press man, “the Line is…” I tensed. I fumbled for the ball. The LINE! … “From our point of view,” said Baldwin, as I boggled with excitement, “the key message today has got to be …” Here it came, I thought. This is what he is paid for. This is the thought that will tee up critical journalists across the country, give them their agenda, help them mount their attacks on the Government. “… that it’s all a complete mess,” said Tom Baldwin. 10.14am: Policy Exchange, the centre-right thinktank, has published a report today urging the government to slow the pace of its NHS reforms (pdf). Here’s the key passage. In recent years, GP involvement in commissioning has received widespread support from politicians of all parties and across the NHS. It would be a loss to everyone if it were discredited and the emerging consensus destroyed through overly rapid implementation. The changes that are planned are a natural next step from trials in the 1990s and from Labour’s practice-based commissioning programme. However, the government has lost many potential supporters, both inside and outside the NHS, through pressing ahead with them so quickly. If these issues are simply swept under the carpet then patient care may suffer in the transfer to the new system and further undermine confidence in the proposals. On the other hand, if the hard work is done to slow things down, to bring sceptics back on board and to lay a solid evidence base for the scheme, then its potential to deliver real and lasting transformation in the NHS is enormous. 9.55am: Oliver Letwin’s penchant for blunt talk has got him into trouble again. Boris Johnson told a People’s Question Time event recently that he was “absolutely scandalised the other day to hear a government minister tell me he did not want to see more families in Sheffield able to afford cheap holidays”. At the weekend, in his new Daily Mail column, Iain Martin identified the minister as Letwin. (Letwin’s aides aren’t commenting on the story, but they haven’t issued a denial.) Today Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham, has issued an open letter to the Cabinet Office minister about his remarks. Here’s an extract. I was saddened to read the remarks attributed to you that “We don’t want more people from ­Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays.” This is pure snobbery that is unworthy of someone with your wealth and privileged upbringing. It will confirm the view of many in South Yorkshire that this cabinet has the same contempt for the region that Margaret Thatcher and John Major showed as they targeted South Yorkshire industries and the culture of the working people of the region in the 1980s and 1990s. What is about Conservatives that they dislike Sheffield so much? Can I say these rmarks are profoundly offensive to all the people of South Yorkshire who has much right to enjoy a holiday as the millionaires in the cabinet. It is also an insult to the many people who work in the travel business and to the EU’s single market which has allowed low-cost airlines to fly from Doncaster, Leeds-Bradford, Manchester and the East Midlands and transport thousands of my constituents to holidays they can afford. 9.18am: David Ford, the justice minister in Northern Ireland, told Radio 5 Live this morning that the Police Service of Northern Ireland no longer needed a 50/50 Protestant/Catholic recruitment policy. According to PoliticsHome, this is what he said: The 50/50 recruitment policy was a short term policy to increase the number of Catholics in the police service faster than would otherwise have happened. It has come to an end because the need for it has reached an end. We see in recent interviews that the police service, approximately 37% or 38% of those who come in are perceived at Catholics. That is a very significant recruitment figure. It’s clearly a sign that the vast majority – Catholic, Protestant or neither – see the police service as their police service and in many cases want to be part of. 8.53am: Steve Webb, the pensions minister, is publishing a green paper on state pension reform. Jill Insley and Patrick Wintour have got a story about his plans in the paper today, and it’s the subject of Jackie Ashley’s column. Webb has been giving a series of interviews about his plans this morning. According to the Press Association and PoliticsHome, these are the main points he’s been making. • Webb said the current system was “utterly baffling”. He went on: “No one understands how the system works.” • He said the new system – involving a flat-rate, universal pension – would cost much the same as the current system. “It won’t be a king’s ransom,” Webb said. “We’re broadly talking about sending the same money but spending it in a simpler way. What we’re saying is, we take the complicated system, the state pension, the means-tested [element and] roll them into a single payment.” • He said that people who had built up entitlements under the current system would not lose what they had already paid for. • He said higher earners would lose out under the new arrangements. “The people who are the highest earners will still get the flat-rate amount instead of a larger state pension, so we will be spending less on the highest earners, but they will save while they are at work,” he said. • But women who have taken time off work to look after children would gain under the new system, he said. One of the groups who lose out at the moment through pensions are women, particularly those who have spent time out of work looking after children. They very often find they get a lower state pension. This new system will change that. It will mean that time at home, bringing up a family, caring for an elderly relative will be just as valuable as a paid job and I think that is the right way to go. • He said the government would consult on creating a mechanism that would automatically increase the state pension age as life expectancy increases. 8.41am: We’ll be focusing on welfare and the public services today. With David Cameron on a mission to rescue the health bill , Ed Miliband will be setting out his own thoughts on the future of the public services. And Steve Webb will be publishing details of the government’s plans for the future of the state pensions . Webb has already been giving a series of interviews this morning; I’ll post the highlights shortly. Here’s the full diary for the day. 8.30am: Michael Gove , the education secretary, visits a school in London to publicise new guidance saying headteachers will be able to press criminal charges against pupils who make false allegations against teachers in England. 11am: Ed Miliband delivers a speech on the future of public services . He will use it to urge David Cameron to shelve his plans to NHS reform and to convene cross-party talks on the NHS’s future instead. 3.30pm: Steve Webb , the pensions minister, is expected to make a statement in the Commons about the government’s plans for a universal state pension . 4pm: The Ministry of Defence is to announce details of its army and navy redundancy programme . As usual, I’ll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm. Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk