In the spirit of praising best practice when it arises, I feel it incumbent upon me to record that, for once, the BBC’s radio and online reporting of Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech was exemplary in pointing out when the proposed legislation related solely or mainly to England and not the whole of the UK. The news broadcasts I heard on Radio 4 pointed out explicitly that the key measures for schools, the NHS and social care applied to England alone: something quite unprecedented for the BBC. And the summary of the legislative programme on the BBC website indicated for each item which UK nations they related to. E.g. Children, Schools and Families Bill, “Whole bill applies to England. Other parts cover Wales and extends in part to Northern Ireland”; Personal Care at Home Bill, “Applies to England only”; and Health Bill, “guaranteeing cancer patients in England a consultation within two weeks, a free health check for all over-40s and that no-one will have to wait more than 18 months [I think that should read 'weeks'] between a GP referral and hospital treatment”. Well done, BBC!

I can’t comment on the TV news or on other news media, as I didn’t see them. But I was further encouraged yesterday by Radio 4’s reporting on the farcical row that has broken out about the proposals for free personal care, with some Labour MPs complaining they have pre-empted the conclusions of a consultation that ended only this week (a blatant case of electioneering, then). The Radio 4 report, on ‘Today In Parliament’, was prefaced by the mention that the proposals related to England only.

If the BBC can make it clear in this way which parts of the UK the government’s legislative programme relate to, then there’s hope that, come the general election, it will similarly make an effort to point out which of the UK’s nations are affected, and which are not, by the policies the parties present and debate during the election campaign. In any case, I’m keeping a watching brief and will be bashing off further emails of complaint should the occasion arise. I nearly did so the other night, in fact, when I heard a BBC World Service discussion on the work of NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence): the body that decides whether to approve drugs for the NHS in England and Wales based on a cost-benefit analysis. The World Service report failed to mention NICE’s geographical remit, implying that its work related to the whole of the UK; whereas we know that Scotland enjoys better per-capita funding than England for drug treatments and is not under NICE’s thumb. But it was kind of late; and I need to get out more!

I have, however, received a holding reply to my last complaint, about the misreporting of the government’s proposals for ten new nuclear power plants, all but one of which are to be located in England – and none in Scotland (wonder why). So watch this space.

The Patients Association – a lobby group that looks after NHS patients’ concerns and rights in England and Wales – yesterday published a shocking report containing 16 case studies of the mistreatment and neglect of elderly and vulnerable patients in NHS hospitals.

It probably won’t surprise my readers to learn that all the case studies in question related to English hospitals. However, this fact appeared to elude the media yesterday. At one point, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, it was stated that the case studies were drawn from “across the UK”, wording that was reiterated on the BBC website. Later in the programme, in the news headlines, they did indicate that all 16 case studies involved the experiences of English patients only, while clarifying that people from throughout the UK had contacted the Patients Association with similar examples of neglect. Another article on the BBC website does make this explicit while failing to make clear that not only the examples of abuses but the whole objective and scope of the report are to highlight instances of malpractice in England, and to call on the Department of Health (England) and the Care Quality Commission (the quango that looks after the quality of health- and social care in England) to take action.

Sky News are no better. The report on their website equally makes no mention of the England-only content and purpose of the Patients Association report. The Sky News web page contains a video in which agony aunt Claire Rayner, the president of the Association, asserts that many of the problems derive from the government’s obsession with targets, which force NHS staff to regard patients as mere units and as boxes to tick off rather than real people needing time, care and attention. Of course, this government-driven target culture, and the innumerable targets themselves, affect the English NHS only. They do things differently in the devolved NHS’s.

(Incidentally, I drew the failure of the Sky News report to mention the England-only nature of the story to the attention of their person in charge of dealing with viewer concerns, with whom I’ve been having an email dialogue following on from an open letter to the BBC that I posted on English Parliament Online and drew to Sky News’ attention. I received an initial response from the Sky News executive in question, in which he maintained that Sky does always take care to indicate when a political story relates to England only. I’ve since drawn to his attention two instances relating to the English NHS – including the present one – where this has manifestly not been the case; but I have yet to hear back from him.)

One of the reasons why the lazy media got it wrong – again – is that the Patients Association report does not make it explicit at any point that its observations and recommendations relate to England only. But they do affect only England: as I said, all the case studies concern events that took place in England; and the report’s call to action is addressed only to the authorities that deal with the English NHS. This absence of explicit references to England is in fact a characteristic of all the Patient Association’s communications and campaigns. Indeed, looking at its website, you’d be hard put to work out that the Association’s active campaigning is limited to England and Wales, and then in the latter country only in instances relating to common English and Welsh law. However, reading between the lines, all of the Association’s campaigns dealing with issues of health-care delivery, and the way in which they’re described on the website (with references to ‘the government’ and the Department of Health (England)), emerge as England-specific: GP services, care of older people, health-care-associated infections, dentistry and mixed-sex wards. I then discovered that there is a separate Scotland Patients Association – not affiliated to the (England and Wales) Patient Association – that deals with the corresponding issues for the Scottish NHS.

Why does the Patients Association (England and Wales) appear to go out of its way to conceal the in fact mostly England-specific nature of its activities? This seems in part to be an issue of funding. The PA reported that, after its report was publicised in the media yesterday, it had been “inundated by hundreds of emails and calls from patients across the country contacting us to offer their support and relate their own experiences of poor care”. This will in effect have served as a massive membership drive, and the Patients Association welcomes members (and corresponding financial contributions) from across the UK. It was therefore important for the Association to emphasise that their report deals with issues of concern to people across the UK, which the rush of offers of support and information on further abuses yesterday confirmed. Also, to be fair, the PA does provide information on how to complain about, and seek legal redress for, poor NHS treatment in each of the UK’s nations. But in terms of campaigning for action and change, the Patients Association’s activities are largely limited to England. The Association is in effect soliciting financial support from Scottish and Northern Irish citizens that would probably be more effectively directed to their own patients’ associations, which can actually do something about issues in those countries.

A similar situation applies to corporate sponsorship. The Patients Association’s list of corporate sponsors contains some impressive names; e.g. AstraZeneca, Denplan, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Napp Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer and Virgin Healthcare. Compare these with the sponsors of the Scottish Association: Arnold Clark, Barrhead Travel, It’s so Easy! Travel Insurance, Lloyds Pharmacy, Mobility Scotland, ScotWest Credit Union, Ross Harper Solicitors and Vision Call – Eye Care Home Services. Hardly as prestigious nor, one suspects, as remunerative! The Patients Association is clearly passing itself off as the ‘British’ association in order to secure the backing of such global blue-chip enterprises. Does it fear that if it more accurately designated itself as the Patients Association for England and Wales, it would lose some of these sponsors and the revenue they bring, and would have to rely on more ‘parochial’ English names?

On one level, I am reluctant to criticise the Association for this, as it is clearly important that it maximises its income in order to act as an effective advocate for English and Welsh NHS patients. However, is this advocacy not itself severely impaired and limited by the Association’s almost total avoidance of references to England, or to England and Wales, in the campaign material it puts out? Referring to issues relating to health-care delivery in England without any reference to England itself, as if they were issues of relevance to the whole of the UK, insulates the Association’s critiques and prevents them from becoming a truly powerful cross-UK analysis involving comparisons between practices, patient satisfaction and funding in each of the UK’s health services. It is as if the Association does not want in any way to connect its criticisms of bad practice in England with the politics of devolution, and of health-care funding and provision in the rest of the UK. But isn’t it vitally important to compare the experience of patients in England with that in Scotland or Wales; and if they’re doing things better in those countries, what can we in England learn from them – and do we need to direct more funding into improving the situation in England, given that per-capita expenditure on health care in England lags that in the other UK nations?

But clearly, the Patients Association has decided to avoid getting enmeshed in such political controversies. It would rather carry on working away in its own little bubble: drawing its concerns to the Department of Health (England) and the (English) Care Quality Commission without embarrassing either of these bodies by pointing out to the public that they’re letting England down compared with the corresponding bodies in the other UK countries that are more focused on the needs of their countrymen and -women. After all, rock the boat too much, and you could put off the corporate sponsors; and go on about England too much, and you could put off the individual members from Scotland and Northern Ireland.

But is it possible for the Patients Association to help bring about real improvements to the care provided to English NHS patients if the Association itself doesn’t care enough about England to mention her by name?

Got a reply from Jamie Angus, the editor of Radio Four’s World At One programme, to my complaint about an article on Friday that completely omitted to mention that the government’s proposed reforms of literacy and numeracy teaching in primary schools related to England only (see previous post):

“David you are absolutely right. The item in the news bulletin mentioned
this was England-only, but we should have mentioned it again in the
interviews that followed later in the programme. Apologies for getting
this wrong.”

Here’s a note of complaint I sent to the BBC Radio Four World at One programme yesterday:

“I would like to complain about the article on today’s programme concerning the government’s plans to hand responsibility for achieving targets on English and maths in primary schools to local authorities.

“Not once in the entire article, including the interview with the Secretary of State, was it mentioned that these changes relate to England only. Granted, many of your listeners are well informed about devolution; but there must have been many thousands who were not aware that the current system and the government’s proposals affect only English schools.

“It is a dereliction of your duty to contextualise the news not to have indicated this. Most listeners in the devolved nations will probably have realised the article didn’t concern them; so it was insulting to them, too, to pretend that this was a UK story. Unless the default ‘nation’ for domestic policy stories is in fact England, meaning you’d only have to spell it out if it was a genuine UK-wide report. Which is it?”

This matters because the government is obviously trying to make political capital out of this U-turn and adoption of Tory policy ahead of the next general election. If listeners are made aware that the existing and proposed policies affect England only, this invites comparison with Scotland and Wales, which have already abandoned ‘central-government’ control over teaching methods. The plans to ‘localise’ much of education policy – in England – were even referred to at one point as a ‘devolution’.

So in England, we’ve had to put up with an authoritarian, rigid form of control from Westminster for the duration of the Labour government, whereas in Scotland and Wales, they’ve already been able to develop strategies that hand more responsibility over to teachers, because of devolution. Now we’re getting our own devolution of primary school teaching in England; but this is devolution down to local not national level. But, by omitting to reference the England-only character of the government’s move, the impression is created that a UK-wide policy change is being carried out. The government thereby earns kudos for making a long-overdue improvement but avoids awkward questions about why they insisted on a methodology for England that had already been abandoned in the rest of the UK.

And they also avoid questions about the democratic legitimacy of their power to legislate on English education only without a specific mandate from the English people. Instead, the very existence of any national-English level at which this policy could be examined, decided upon and implemented is circumvented by making out that this is a programme of UK-wide localisation, instead of an England-only policy that lacks the authority and national vision of the policies in Scotland and Wales.