The Health and Social Care Select Committee plays an important role in influencing policy in health and life sciences – as shown by recent inquiries on the future of cancer care and prevention. In this article, we look at the motivations of the new Committee Chair and consider how the political agenda might influence the priorities that emerge on health.
It may have come as a surprise for some that the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dem) were handed the chairmanship of the Health and Social Care Committee, as Layla Moran MP takes on the role as one of three Committee Chairs the party has been allocated post-election.
There is no doubt that health and social care is at the top of the Lib Dem agenda – the party’s election campaign included numerous efforts aimed at highlighting their priority issues – from the need to invest more in mental health, to championing the cause of unpaid carers. The party’s leadership has been emphatic about their mandate on the NHS – it is the key policy area they talked about on the doorstep and one on which they believe they can make their mark as they enter Parliament with 72 MPs (the largest number the party has ever achieved and over a three-fold increase on their results in 2019).
However, reforming the NHS is also a key priority for the government, that went into the general election with five ‘missions’ for reform, including their Health Mission focused on ‘building an NHS fit for the future’. We are now in the midst of the government shaping and defining that agenda – with a ‘national conversation’ underway to develop a ‘10 Year Plan’ for health.
The challenge for the Lib Dems will be getting cut through on a policy area that is also so clearly central for the government, so leadership of the Health and Social Care Committee provides them with a crucial platform to make their mark on health. Indeed, Moran’s chairmanship marks the first time since 1983 that an opposition party has held the role.
On many issues, the Lib Dems are broadly aligned with the government’s objectives for healthcare reform; their ambitions for dentistry, for improved GP access and improving outcomes in key disease areas, such as cancer, are all issues that the Labour party also highlighted in the run-up to the general election. An overarching question for the Lib Dems is what role they can and should play as the third largest party in Parliament when it comes to their opposition to the government.
In her role as Committee Chair, Layla Moran will be a central figure in scrutinising the government’s healthcare agenda. There is a strong case for using the Committee’s remit to develop the cross-party consensus that is much needed on some of the most pressing challenges facing the NHS – working through the difficult decisions that need to be made to move resources upstream and drastically modernise how health services operate. With seven of the 11 MPs sitting on the Committee coming from the Labour Party, it is a natural forum for the Lib Dems and Labour to seek to align on NHS reform.
Nonetheless, the Committee has announced its inaugural inquiry – Adult Social Care: The Cost of Inaction. The topic of social care reform has long been politically fraught, but it is an issue that has been top of the agenda for Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey, and arguably the policy area on which the Lib Dems could most clearly distinguish themselves from the government. The decision to lead with this inquiry likely speaks to Moran’s desire to use the Committee, at least in part, as a platform to advance changes for which her party wants to be recognised and to drive attention towards challenges on which the government has said very little to date.
In this sense, the Committee could prove to become the key forum for the Lib Dems as they seek to pursue a policy of ‘constructive opposition’. This premise was a focal point at the Lib Dem conference – with members of the party’s senior leadership grappling with how they can find political space and define themselves as distinct from a government with which they broadly agree on health and wider reform.
All this means that the Health and Social Care Select Committee, and the direction Moran takes it in, is not only a key bell weather for the future of health policy, but also one of the most politically significant Committees in this Parliament.
