A parliamentary report on NHS spending has been blocked from publication because Labour “felt it was too supportive of the government”.
Labour MPs on the Commons health select committee claimed that a draft study into NHS funding was overreliant on evidence from Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England.
The report — the result of weeks of committee hearings — has ended up in the bin.
A fraught private session yesterday even resulted in a vote against an attempt to hold a futher meeting to hammer out a compromise.
One Tory source said: “The Labour side came in determined to vote down this report because it wasn’t critical enough of the government. They won’t support anything they can’t weaponise.”
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The Conservatives believe that Labour committee members seemed determined to block the report because it did not support the party’s claim that the NHS had been privatised in this parliament.
A Labour source dismissed this: “I don’t think all the evidence was put in the report and we wanted to go through it line by line. There was an attempt to write a report in a completely different way to anything we’d done before but it’s definitely not the case that we wanted to block the report.”
The source added that they were prepared to go through the report line by line “as usual”.
One committee source said it was “a huge shame and a scandalous waste of parliamentary time and effort”.
It is extremely rare that reports are never published.
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There is understood to have been particular dispute over the figures about the level of private care in the NHS and descriptions of the “better care fund”, which is meant to link health and social care.
Labour is understood to have attacked the over-reliance on evidence from Mr Stevens, even though he was a former health adviser to Tony Blair.
The decision among Labour members on the committee to question Mr Stevens’s impartiality could raise doubts over whether he would command the confidence of Labourif it won the election.
Some critics of the report were even asked whether a committee recommendation that there would be no further top-down reorganisation of the NHS be taken out, apparently to give a future government scope to carry out social care.
Valerie Vaz, a Labour member of the committee, is understood to have accused her Conservative colleagues of personally attacking her over the report during the meeting.
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In the vote, the Tories were defeated 4-3 by Labour. Sarah Wollaston, the committee chairwoman, and Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat on the committee, abstained. Dr Wollaston said last night that it would be inappropriate for her to comment.