According to the BBC and most other news sources, the Government is about to propose that cancer patients should be given a ‘right’ to a quick appointment, along with some other NHS service ‘rights’.
If you’re cynical about it, this is just a bit of spin on a policy target – if your ‘right’ is ‘breached’, the hospital has to fund treatment at an alternative facility. You won’t be going to Strasbourg with these rights.
Beyond its immediate significance, though, it’s another attempt from the Government to entrench their political philosophy, clearly done in contemplation of a Conservative government in the offing.
It’s similar to the Climate Change Act, which, you will recall, gives the Government itself a legal requirement to cut carbon emissions. Now NHS patients are being given new rights related to the quality and speed of the service they receive. By extension, you could give people the right to have a Saturday postal delivery, or the right to have a train station within 10 miles of their house.
I’m not sure that this sort of constitutional innovation is to be welcomed. Whether you agree with the goals expressed or not, entrenching high-level policy priorities in this way makes it harder for an incoming Government to implement the expressed will of the people.
It also skews lower-level decision-making. Imagine, for example, that there were a legal requirement to maintain a Saturday postal delivery. A Government elected on a tax-cutting manifesto would be much more reluctant to cut the Saturday delivery than they would to, say, scale back hospital investment. The Saturday delivery would require contentious primary legislation to abolish – the hospital budget can be cut overnight, with much less fuss. So, even if the Saturday delivery were the right thing to cut on a political or a cost/benefit basis, it would be more likely to avoid the axe.
In the British system, the point of elections is to chuck the bums out, along with their policies. If every Government tried to lock in its priorities for fear of losing the next election, we will be left with a policy map like the Holy Roman Empire – a thousand little castles and barricades, and no-one with real control of what happens.
