Health and Social Care Act 2012

Health and Social Care Act 2012

United Kingdom
Long title	An Act to establish and make provision about a National Health Service Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups and to make other provision about the National Health Service in England; to make provision about public health in the United Kingdom; to make provision about regulating health and adult social care services; to make provision about public involvement in health and social care matters, scrutiny of health matters by local authorities and cooperation between local authorities and commissioners of health care services; to make provision about regulating health and social care workers; to establish and make provision about a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence; to establish and make provision about a Health and Social Care Information Centre and to make other provision about information relating to health or social care matters; to abolish certain public bodies involved in health or social care; to make other provision about health care; and for connected purposes.
Citation	7
Introduced by	Andrew Lansley Secretary of State for Health
Territorial extent	Section 46, 56 (1) and (3), 57, 58, 60, 150 (2) and paragraph 1 of Schedule 13, Section 214 (1) Section 222 (1), Sections 230(1) - (4), and (6) and paragraph 53 and 59 of Schedule 15, Part 7, Section 231 (1), (3) And Part 2 of Schedule 20, Section 300, 301, Part 12, extend to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Sections 128-133 extend to England and Wales and Scotland only
Dates
Royal assent	27 March 2012
Status: Current legislation
History of passage through Parliament
Text of statute as originally enacted
Revised text of statute as amended

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 (c 7) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provided for the most extensive reorganisation of the structure of the National Health Service in England to date.^[1] It removed responsibility for the health of citizens from the Secretary of State for Health, which the post had carried since the inception of the NHS in 1948. It abolished primary care trusts (PCTs) and strategic health authorities (SHAs) and transferred between £60 billion and £80 billion of "commissioning", or healthcare funds, from the abolished PCTs to several hundred clinical commissioning groups, partly run by the general practitioners (GPs) in England. A new executive agency of the Department of Health, Public Health England, was established under the act on 1 April 2013.^[2]

The proposals were primarily the result of policies of the then Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley. Writing in the BMJ, Clive Peedell (co-chairman of the NHS Consultants Association and a consultant clinical oncologist) compared the policies with academic analyses of privatisation and found "evidence that privatisation is an inevitable consequence of many of the policies contained in the Health and Social Care Bill".^[3] Lansley said that claims that the government was attempting to privatise the NHS were "ludicrous scaremongering".^[4]

The proposals contained in the act were some of the coalition government's most controversial. Although mentioned in the Conservative Party's manifesto in 2010,^[5] they were not contained in the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition agreement,^[1] which mentioned the NHS only to commit the coalition to a real-term funding increase every year.^[6] Within two months of the election a white paper was published, outlining what The Daily Telegraph called the "biggest revolution in the NHS since its foundation".^[7] The bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 19 January 2011.^[8][9] In April 2011 the government announced a "listening exercise", halting the Bill's legislative progress until after the May local elections; the "listening exercise" finished by the end of that month. The Bill received Royal Assent on 27 March 2012. Many of the structures established by this Act of Parliament were dismantled by the Health and Care Act 2022.