Health minister Hugo de Jonge is lobbying for a change in EU regulations which require large local authority healthcare contracts to be put out to European tender.

De Jonge was in Strasbourg earlier this week to talk to MEPs about the issue, which he says should not be considered suitable for the free market. ‘Care is not a market, let alone a European market,’ De Jonge said on Twitter.

Local authorities in the Netherlands are currently responsible for youth care, services for the elderly and home nursing but under EU rules must open the contracts to companies from all over the EU.

‘We’ve never had a Polish or a Portuguese youth care service supplier tendering for a Dutch contract,’ he said. ‘It takes a tremendous amount of red tape and it does not help either the quality or the continuity of care services.’

De Jonge said the issue is a particularly Dutch one, because of the way care services are organised in the Netherlands. And he admitted that getting support for change would be a long process.

De Jonge said he hoped that MEPs would call for a review of the way the current rules are working and that this would be the first step towards changing the system.

De Jonge, a minister on behalf of the Christian Democrats, said just under a year ago that the use of market forces in the domestic healthcare system had gone too far and needed to be limited.