The Bill still stands but a number of amendments are to be made and debated by the Public Bill Committee for the Health and Social Care Bill. The amendments clarify roles better, ensure accountability from the top down and focus on clinical care and patient feedback throughout the NHS system from the bottom up.
The NHS is a complex body with a plethora of stakeholders. The reforms have been evaluated from different viewpoints such as the effect on healthcare staff, voluntary organisations, local authorities and the NHS structure as a whole. The extent of the possible privatisation of services is an issue for many, but so far the impact on companies that sell their products and services to the NHS has not been fully evaluated.
MackSense intends to conduct both quantitative and qualitative market research on these reforms. Our research will help pharmaceutical, medical device, private health insurance and healthcare service providers understand this issue and we will deliver insights into the strategy required for continued market access to the NHS.
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The NHS Commissioning Board and the Clinical Commissioning Groups (the new name for GP Consortia) will promote and uphold the NHS constitution. The Secretary of State will again become accountable for securing the provision of services, although he will not secure those services directly and will report annually on the health services. The Secretary of State will also have the power to intervene if there is a failure on the part of the NHS Commissioning Board, the Care Quality Commission, HealthWatch, NICE and the Information Centre. Ministers will also have a ‘duty to keep health services functions under review’ and hold all the relevant bodies to account. This change will be a welcome one for groups concerned that there would be no parliamentary accountability for the management of the NHS.
There is also greater clarification on the role of the Clinical Commissioning Consortias, who must have NHS in their title and clear reference to their locality, which is to be within local authority boundaries. The consortias will publish their constitution to show how they are set up and run, but more importantly will have to publish details of how their payments have been used. They must obtain advice from a wide range of professionals on the ‘prevention, diagnosis or treatment of illness’ and follow guidelines and accountability from the NHS commissioning board on their function.
They will have responsibility for all the potential patients in their local area, not just those registered at GP practices and will provide Accident and Emergency and ambulance services. They will also have a duty to promote research, best practice and innovation. Clinical senates will be held with key clinical experts and hosted by the NHS commissioning board to facilitate best practice across the NHS.
The Wellcome Trust is pleased with the focus on research, because they spend over £600m a year on research each year, but have found that the NHS in the past has failed to make the most of discoveries for preventing, diagnosing and treating disease .
Health and Wellbeing boards (made up of clinical commissioning groups and local authorities) must now involve their local HealthWatch authorities in decision making to ensure a patient voice and a carer’s voice, in order to include the social care element of healthcare. Clinical Commissioning Groups must now have a governing body, with the ability to audit their activities; this body has to be made up of two lay members, one registered nurse and one doctor with secondary care experience.
Monitor’s new role as independent economic regulator for all health and adult social care includes price setting and promoting competition. However, the focus of promoting competition as an end in itself has been removed after the listening exercise and now its core duty will be to protect and promote patient’s interests. Monitor will be responsible for creating public and patient involvement and taking clinical advice, rather than just promote competition. Prices will be set for a range of procedures and services based on clinical complexity, so that difficult procedures are as appealing in terms of profit . This latest development will be welcomed by the Royal College of Nursing and the British Medical Association who requested this change .
All NHS trusts were set to become Foundation Trusts (FTs) by April 2014, but this has been amended to about 2016 and will based on the NHS trusts’ clinical readiness for this transition. Foundation Trusts will remain governed and accredited by Monitor until 2016.
FTs are set up in the form of community-oriented co-operatives in which anyone can become a governor and hold the board of directors to account . The Foundation Trust Network greatly welcomes this bill because it will infer them freedom of borrowing powers, approval of significant mergers and acquisitions. Most importantly it will lift the private patient income cap, which was previously set at very low limits.
FTs will have the power to make money and capitalise on private health treatments and will be competing with each other for patients. The rhetoric of ‘cherry picking services’ coming from the left of politics is derived from this. In the future, performance in hospitals will no longer be measured against waiting times, but on care outcomes, such as how well someone who has suffered a stroke has been able to live independently.
In 2007 the Labour government lifted NHS restrictions and allowed patients to have non-urgent operations privately. Now some 16,000 such operations are taking place on a monthly basis. There are also regular cases of the NHS paying for patients to have surgery privately. In the winter 2009 The Brighton and Sussex University Hospital NHS Trust was overloaded with patients and reasoned that it was actually cheaper to make ‘one off’ payments for private operations at the local Nuffield Hospital than keep their own hospital theatres operating over the weekends.
The term ‘Any Qualified Provider’ (AQP) is a model that accredits providers offering services to the NHS. The soon to be disbanded Primary Health Care Trusts (PCTs) used to commission contracts in this manner, on top of directly providing their own services.
In the past AQPs were usually accredited for routine elective services, where demand was manageable. Costs were uniform and the services were relatively straight forward, e.g. hip replacements. However, PCTs will no longer be directly providing services. Instead a patient or doctor can now choose services offered by AQPs. For example a wheelchair user may find the best wheelchair on the market and ask their GP to provide it for them. This will result in more involvement of voluntary and private sectors in the NHS.
GPs as commissioners will have the power to choose private healthcare for their patients. The latest amendments to the bill show that the government is still committed to patients’ choice through the AQP provision, but the start date for this provision is now delayed until April 2012. The choice of AQP will be limited to services covered by national or local tariff pricing. This is to ensure that there will not be ‘cherry picking’ of more simple procedures, because pricing will be set on clinical complexity. For example a cataract operation will be set at a lower price than heart surgery so that both procedures are appealing in terms of profit for AQPs. The first focus for AQPs will be on areas where patients are already demanding more choice. It is now unlikely that acute care and A & E will be applicable to AQP provision.
The question will be whether GPs will opt for AQPs over NHS services (MackSense will ask this question in its forthcoming white paper). Patients will have much more say in the choice of their care in terms of both service and medical treatments. The government aims to make shared-decision making between patient and clinician the norm: ‘no decision about me without me. Cancer drugs will be made available to patients (when clinicians recommend them) via a new Cancer Drugs Fund, irrespective of whether NICE has approved the drug for NHS use.
Healthcare companies can take advantage of this shift by engaging with patient groups and commissioning quality market research to find out what patients’ needs are. They can use this information to design products and services that will ultimately influence GPs commissioning choices via the patients themselves.
A recent spanner in the works for healthcare firms has come from the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who is now calling for AQP provision in the bill to be re-thought or dropped. His response reflects distaste at the results of a recent survey carried out by The Parthenon Group on top private healthcare CEOs. This survey revealed the AQP policy was popular with private healthcare companies, who see a big market opportunity for securing some of the £120bn in NHS funding that will be available via AQP provision.
If the AQP provision remains intact, Pharmaceutical, medical device and healthcare tech sectors will have opportunities to interact with FTs, GP consortias and patients to tender for services like never before.
The healthcare industry’s ability to sell new services and products is susceptible to the spending cuts proposed for the NHS.
A new marketing language with an accent on quality and patient-centered care will be required. Patient centered clinical methodologies focused on product innovation and efficacy of treatments will be paramount to market success. The challenge for this industry is working out the new structure and making business routes into it.
Value Based Pricing (VBP) is set to replace "the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS), which has been in place since the 1950s. The government sees this as necessary because PPRS does not reflect wider economic impacts of health and does not incentivise pharmaceutical firms to invest in R & D for new products for more diverse diseases, but instead produces generic medicines for the most common diseases. The new Value Based Pricing (VBP) will incorporate the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY plus) approach in which NICE will evaluate the drugs and medical devices on their ability to reduce the burden of illness and therapeutic innovation. What does this mean? Basically drugs will have to be affordable, innovative and be able to treat chronic and more obscure disease thus easing the burden on the patient’s experience and the NHS spend on treating them. The problem is that drug pricing uncertainty may put the pharmaceutical industry off and they will expect prices to reflect what the going rate is in other countries they supply to."
At the most recent NICE conference, there was optimism about NHS/industry collaboration. Recognition that competing interests such as profit over value should be not discount steps towards drug innovation. Patrick Valance, Senior Vice President of GSK, stated that progresses in biomedical understanding had not been translated into new medicines and that both the industry and the NHS should work together to create new drugs for wider disease applications. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) echoes these sentiments and generally welcomes the new bill’s commitment to patients. They are monitoring the changes to structural reform and view the life sciences industry as key to helping the NHS achieve favourable treatments through innovation.
The government is also consulting on a ‘patent box’ scheme for the Finance Bill 2012, which will give corporation tax relief to companies that register and develop patients in the UK. Healthcare leader GSK will be taking advantage of the scheme. GSK are planning to relocate a large bio-manufacturing plant from India to Montrose in Scotland. The staffing costs will be higher but CEO Andrew Witty has indicated the skill base and also the ‘patent box’ idea has been a factor in the decision.
It would seem product placement opportunities and success depend on how effectively this industry connects with patients and on GP consortia’s obligation to provide innovative and effective products. In order to do this effectively healthcare and medtech companies need to know what these groups are thinking. Both qualitative and quantitative market research will be required to get the tone of quality and patient care right. MackSense can provide this feedback and strategy insight for firms.
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]]>But looking behind the report does help to put things into perspective. The report, published on 31 May 2011, says that there is some cause for concern with regard to mobile phone usage as radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B) based on an increased risk of a malignant type of brain cancer associated with wireless phone use called glioma.
The report from the IARC was put together by a working group who discussed the possibility of long term health effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields of mobile phone usage, microwaves, radar, radio, TV and wireless communication exposures. The Working Group looked at the exposure data, studies of cancer in humans and in experimental animals as well as mechanistic and other data.
There are various different classifications of materials and how carcinogenic they are depending on their effects on health.
The IARC classification is as follows:
Group 1 – the agent is carcinogenic
Group 2A – the agent is probably carcinogenic to humans
Group 2B – the agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans
Group 3 – the agent is not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans
Group 4 – the agent is probably not carcinogenic to humans
From this latest working group mobile phone usage has been classed as Group 2B (possibly carcinogenic). It is worth remembering, however, that this group, 2B, is a catch-all category and includes many agents such as chloroform, naphthalene, vinyl acetate and styrene while coffee and pickled vegetables are included as possibly carcinogenic mixtures and being a carpenter or joiner, fire fighter or dry cleaner are potentially hazardous occupations. Group 3 includes those materials that just have not had enough research done to say whether or not they are possibly carcinogenic to humans and includes talc, tea and fluorescent lighting. As for Group 4, it only has one material or agent, caprolactum, which is a colourless and solid organic compound precursor to Nylon 6, a widely used synthetic polymer.
There have been many differing views on whether or not mobile phones cause cancer. The largest study, which was conducted in Denmark with 420,095 respondents followed over 21 years to find out the incidence of cancer and phone usage, concluded that there was no discernable link between mobile phone usage and brain cancer and leukaemia . Another study conducted in 2007 in five European countries again found no link between mobile phone usage and glioma.
Overall there has been no real link between mobile phones and cancer but on the other hand mobiles and smartphones are relatively new and with the uptake globally getting higher some groups are urging some level of caution. Children aged 16 and under in particular are advised to limit their usage to essential calls only as their brains and nervous systems are still developing and as of yet there has not been enough conclusive research on this area.
General advice is to use headsets, hand free devices or texting rather than just phoning . To many users hooked on their mobile phones, this may well fall on deaf ears. After all, driving while using their mobile, even with a headset, is the biggest tangible threat to mobile phone users who are four times more likely to be involved in an accident while using your phone...
]]>The human brain is the centre of the nervous system, containing 100 billion neurons, all passing messages to one another via up to 1000 trillion synaptic connections. Brain mapping, a set of neuroscience techniques used to gain a better understanding of all these neurons and connections, sets out to create a spatial representation of the brain by collecting images (neuroimaging) from a number of different sources. These images are then transformed into data and analysed to gain a better understanding of the brain.
A wealth of information is constantly being gathered on the structure, anatomy, physiology, perfusion, function and phenotypes of both healthy and diseased brains, which can be used in a number of different ways. Some researchers and professionals use it to watch what the brain does as it performs certain tasks, e.g. being able to identify an object, or understanding what someone is saying. Others use it to understand the impact of environmental factors on the brain as a whole, for example, the effects of various drugs, aging and learning. This research also contributes to the understanding of the brain when it is affected by illness or disease, for example, autism, clinical depression or schizophrenia.
A large part of the process of mapping the brain is neuroimaging, a group of techniques used to provide structural imaging and functional imaging of the brain. Structural imaging is used to show large-scale intracranial disease such as tumours or brain injury. Functional imaging works on a finer scale, diagnosing metabolic diseases and lesions. Functional imaging is also used for neurological and clinical psychological research, as well as for building brain-computer interfaces. A number of these techniques (PET scans, SPECT scans and MRIs) enable researchers and scientists to build a 3D computer model of the brain, allowing for better study, diagnosis and therapy.
3D medical imaging (including neuroimaging) has been around since the 1970s, and is a huge industry. Global Industry Analysts, Inc. estimates that spending in this market will reach USD3.5 billion by 2015, fuelled by an ageing population, a rise in the incidence of critical diseases, increasing applications and technological advancements, as well as a rise in demand from developing countries.
3D medical imaging now has a wide reach within the healthcare industry, shaping a number of different disciplines, including:
These techniques, initially developed for use in healthcare, are also now reaching into other industries. For example, tools developed for medical imaging are now being used in airport security for passenger screening and within the food and pharmaceutical industries for non-invasive, high quality checks of products.
In an industry that seems to be moving away from 2D images at an ever-increasing rate, what then are the benefits of going back to them? Going from an intricate, detailed, sophisticated model of the brain (in this example), to an image akin to something you would find on your Internet browser? Brown University’s reasoning is that the 3D version is too complex; there is simply too much information to make the model useful. They are not, however, discounting the 3D image. In fact, users of their software can toggle between the 2D and 3D images of the brain to see both views. What they are saying is that, sometimes, “there can be too much detail; important elements can go unnoticed.”
In developing a 2D image, the researchers’ aim is, first and foremost, simplicity: to take all the information of the 3D model and make it easy to use. The bundles of nerve cells that link each other in the brain are so intricate and interwoven that users often cannot follow them. Transforming the 3D image into the 2D image allows for a simplified representation of the neural pathways. In particular, researchers were interested in tracking myelin, an insulating layer surrounding the part of neurons that transmits signals and is essential for the proper functioning of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. A lack of myelin (through loss or imperfect growth), is known to cause diseases such as multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophy. Brown University are hoping that along with a better understanding of these diseases through their simplified images, they will also help identify pathologies such as autism, which is being increasingly linked to myelin by neuroscientists.
2D images of the brain are useful in a number of ways. What has made 2D images more useful is the ability to view them on the Internet, via the Google Maps platform. Researchers found that the use of this web-interface allowed for easy collaboration, as well as allowing easy access and quick exploration of the data. Being able to work with colleagues at a distance, using an interface that adopts a “geographical digital-maps framework with associated labels, metrics and statistics”, while still linking to a more in-depth 3D model, can only lead to improvements in the way the brain (and other parts of the body) is understood, as well as improving the diagnosis and treatment of a number of illnesses and diseases.
While 3D imaging will more than likely remain the most used and most useful tool for the majority of the medical community, 2D imaging should not be completely written off. In fact, in a number of cases, this new form of 2D image may be the better option. This is particularly true where a 3D model is also available for comparison, and there is a platform available that allows for collaboration and ease of use. Companies that research and develop hardware and software for medical imaging should take note. It may be that they can gain a market edge by working with researchers and scientists to develop simplified, collaborative, user-friendly versions of complicated models, especially where an illness or disease is only beginning to be understood.
]]>The British Medical Association (BMA) welcomes greater clinician control, but has concerns about the burden of responsibility on GPs. In a recent BMA members feedback survey, they found that 80% of just under 1000 of their members were ‘mostly unwelcoming’ or ‘very unwelcoming’ of the bill.
One concern is that the money from the new NHS Commissioning board will be provided to GP consortia based on successful outcomes, not volume, hence competition will be a new factor for GPs to contend with . The GPs have voiced concerns over their lack of skills for running the consortias. As a result, there is an opportunity for companies to build new relationships by offering training and management services to help GPs. Companies that manage this will undoubtedly have an impact on the shape of the new commissioning process.
The structure of GP consortia groups is as yet unclear, but there are now 141 pilot GP pathfinder groups set up to try out the function of the future GP consortias . At present GP pathfinder groups are collections of GP practices with staff coming from existing Practice Based Commissioning Groups (PBC). The GP pathfinder groups are currently taking project management advice from staff at existing PCTs, but others are signing agreements with private service and management companies.
The BMA have recently stipulated consent for disclosure on confidential patient information should be articulated clearly in the new bill . However the government insists that the Data Protection Act 1998 will ensure a continued patient consent requirement. Patient consent has been an issue for the NHS in the past, because anonymised data used for NHS research was in the form of individual patient numbers and not all the NHS IT systems could configure them. (See our news article on the “Trials and tribulations of the implementation of electronic patient records in England”).
The raft of changes to the NHS and wealth spring of new organisations will need new IT, accounting and patient management systems. In a recent article on the issue, John Gobron, director of Microsoft Health Solutions, indicated that GPs use outdated technology and that the volume of data required to run these new consortias will need to be streamlined. The opportunities for healthcare technology management systems and the firms that provide them are therefore vast.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) views the bill and the NHS savings of £20bn up to 2014 as a ‘cut too far and too fast’ into NHS functions. Like the BMA, the RCN is concerned that competition focus will adversely impact the quality of care. The RCN’s most recent response to the ‘listening’ exercise indicates that the nursing role in the proposed GP consortia should be enshrined in law. Indeed they wish the name ‘GP Consortia’ to be changed to ‘Clinical Commissioning Consortia’, to reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of healthcare provision and consortia membership .
In response to these concerns the Prime Minister said in a recent speech that GP consortias (commissioning consortiums, clinical consortias) would most likely now include nurses and hospital doctors to better represent care across the NHS. He also said ‘clinical senates’ would be set up to produce integrated care pathways across regional areas.
In direct response to the RCN’s concerns about the focus on competition, the Prime Minister states that Monitor will not only be an economic regulator but will also be tasked with ensuring that promotion of competition is actually translated into improved services and treatments for patients. David Cameron also explains that the focus is to create ability for the best providers to shine. He has strongly denied that the NHS will become an insurance-based healthcare system like in the US and that the NHS will continue to remain free at the point of use.
The RCN have also pointed out that the infrastructure for the new NHS system needs to be clearly planned out to prevent disarray in services and that the extent of decentralisation may result in a loss of a tactical oversight by one central body . Peer at the House of Lords, Lord Owen, echoes this sentiment and has concerns that the NHS, which already has many quangos, will become full of numerous unaccountable quangos. He urges healthcare staff to consider how they feel about the public holding them, not politicians, directly accountable for future failures in the NHS, because the bill will pass powers from the secretary of state on to them. Lord Owen also considers the policy of allowing ‘any willing provider’ (now termed ‘any qualified provider’) to submit services to the NHS as open to encroachment of EU laws relating to competition and procurement policy.
]]>The most recent ‘listening’ exercise; has seen a raft of responses, which are calling for an overhaul of the bill. The Labour party have now tabled a motion for it to go back to committee stage, which will mean a line by line re-examination of the bill .
The gist of the responses so far is that the proposed roles will most likely remain intact, but the nature of key stakeholders and the responsibilities they hold may be redefined. This will depend, of course, on how much the government is ‘listening’.
The bill is complex because the NHS is a complex body with a plethora of stakeholders. The reforms have been evaluated from different viewpoints such as the effect on healthcare staff, voluntary organisations, local authorities and the NHS structure as a whole. The extent of the possible privatisation of services is an issue for many, but so far the impact on companies that sell their products and services to the NHS has not been fully evaluated.
MackSense intends to conduct both quantitative and qualitative market research on these reforms. Our research will help pharmaceutical, medical device, private health insurance and healthcare service providers understand this issue and we will deliver insights into the strategy required for continued market access to the NHS.
Sign up for MackSense’s White Paper: The impact of the Health and Social Care bill that is coming out soon by filling out our contact form.
For now we have written a two-part article that provides a cohesive overview of:
Localism is the priority with more power given to new regional GP consortia The bill was born of the white paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, July 2010 , which set out key principles to empower patients and the healthcare providers closest to them by fostering quality-driven cost-effective competition. Localism is the priority and devolved freedoms and responsibilities for local councils and healthcare staff is planned. Health and social care will be combined with the view that both are integral to each other.
The reforms will see Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) in England replaced with regional GP consortia. These consortia groups will control around 80% of the £104 billion NHS budget; as a result GPs will become the new gatekeepers for market access to the NHS. The new NHS Commissioning board will be set up as an independent statutory body with overall control of the budget, allocating funds and holding the GP consortia to account .
The Secretary of State for Health will no longer actively manage the NHS . Instead it will devolve day-to-day decisions to various devolved bodies and its aim will be to promote public health and create autonomy within the health services.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) will remain intact but will change from a special health authority to a non-departmental body. NICE will continue to make recommendations on medicines, treatments and procedures. It will provide an evidence base for patient care, but will expand to include social care . As a result its name will change to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence although the acronym will remain the same (NICE).
Monitor, the body that currently approves and regulates Foundation Trusts (FTs), will be expanded to become the independent economic regulator for all health and adult social care, to promote competition and set prices. Value-based pricing will replace the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation System (PPRS) by 2013.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) will work with Monitor as a quality inspectorate to ensure safety and quality across NHS services. Within the CQC will be a new national body called HealthWatch, which will deal with complaints and healthcare choice from patients. The National HealthWatch body will receive feedback from local HealthWatch organisations (previously Local Improvement Networks- LINKs) to ensure that patients have a voice in the NHS.
Local authorities will have new responsibility of promoting health and lifestyle (previously the role of PCTs) in co-ordination with social care.
Public Health England (PHE) will be the National public health service. Local Health and Wellbeing boards will be set up and run by Directors of Public Health (DPH) jointly appointed by PHE and local authorities. The Health and Wellbeing boards will be tasked with bringing together their local GP consortia, children and adult social care provision and liaising with the public, private and voluntary sectors involved in health and social care provision.
The bill also opens up market access to private and voluntary sectors through the ‘Any Qualified Provider’ (AQP) provision. AQP means that patients and doctors will be able to choose, for example, home chemotherapy, physiotherapy or a wheelchair supplier from any willing provider, be that NHS, voluntary or private.
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]]>There has been talk of using alternatives to cash for some time and as credit and debit cards are used more and more often and cheques are being phased out (the last date that cheques can be used has been set at 31st October 2018 ) other options are needed.
The Oyster travelcard is used in London for travelling on public transport. In September 2007 Barclaycard joined forces with Transport for London (TfL) and the TranSys consortium to introduce a 3-in-1 card. The new card was called the Barclaycard One Pulse and combined a credit card, an Oyster card and smartcard radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which allowed users to pay for small items that cost less than £10 using contactless technology.
Within two months the trend of cashless travelling and paying for small items progressed to a pilot led by O2, TfL, Visa and Barclaycard. 500 London commuters were given Nokia phones to use instead of their Oyster cards and to pay for coffee, newspapers, sandwiches, etc. without using cash or a debit or credit card at about 1,000 outlets located mostly in the City of London and Canary Wharf.
Although in other countries the use of mobile phones to pay for things or to transfer money has grown, trends in the UK have been pretty stagnant. For example, customers in Korea and Japan already use mobile phones with near-field wireless chips to pay for public transport, check into flights and to buy goods from vending machines. While in Kenya over half the population use their mobile phone to send money to relatives that are far away, pay for shopping, utility bills and even for a night out and, most impressively, the taxi home.
Even America is embracing change with the introduction of Square Technology, which allows customers to pay for all sorts of goods and services including fruit and vegetables down the market and in shops. This works by plugging a little square into the customer's iPhone, downloading an app and swiping the credit card through it. Customers get receipts via text message or email and even the trader can see how much they have made each day so it benefits both parties. Square technology is also available on Android and other platforms. It is set to revolutionise payment methods in the USA with the latest innovation announced on 23 May 2011: shoppers can download an app called Card Case to make payments while traders can use another app called Register to track payments.
The situation is about to change in the UK as Barclaycard and Orange have another stab at cashless payment using a Samsung phone and Near Field Technology, which was used in the O2/Nokia pilot. This time the phone has a maximum spending limit of £15, which is ideal for buying a cappuccino on the way to work but not for a day out shopping, for which you will still need your credit or debit card. Although the OnePulse joint venture with Barclaycard and TfL seems to be on its last legs (some our team members cannot apply for a new one with any ease) it will become easier to obtain a phone with contactless technology. Currently the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap is the only handset available with a built-in Near Field Technology chip but other phones will follow, such as the Blackberry Bold 9900 and Google’s Nexus S. O2 are also planning on having a similar service in the second half of 2011.
At the moment about 50,000 outlets have signed up to contactless payment throughout the UK including McDonalds, Prêt a Manger, EAT, Subway and Wilkinsons. But the scheme, which seems aimed at the busy office worker who does not want to spend that extra 30 seconds paying for their lunch with cash, needs to be developed.
The cashless revolution is starting to take off in the UK but there needs to be more take up with companies all over the UK and with a higher limit than £15 so that people can go shopping with their phone and be able to buy costlier articles. If the supermarkets adopt this payment method it will increase usage. And similarly if small traders such as the “bloke” down the market starts making it available, in much the same way as Square has done, then consumers may be more willing to pop down to their local market and just pay using their phone rather than scrabbling for cash.
Japan uses an incredibly sophisticated system for travel where passengers can just take a picture using their phone of the bar code that is on every bus stop and in return they get a timetable and information on when the next bus is due to arrive. Once the bus arrives they pay by swiping their phone in much the same way as Londoners would an Oyster card. If the UK can adapt all the modes of public transport to work on similar principles (and additionally run on time!) take up of phone payment would no doubt increase.
On the other hand people in the UK have had many instances of data being lost or hacked into, credit and debit cards cloned and used even with chip and pin. Online and offline safety and security are paramount for all types of everyday transactions, all the more so for touchless technology, since it is relatively easy to clone a SIM card and to then access the money available on that phone. However, with the current spending limit of £15 and with the added security of having to enter a pin number when using the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap breaching its security might be a bit harder.
The fact remains that on the whole, there is still a lot of cynicism around the cashless revolution. There are many stories of people having had their phone or bank cards hacked or cloned and these consumers are definitely wary of this happening again.
But then there is also the age old problem of what to do when your battery runs out!
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