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NHS Corporate Takeover Bill?

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SkemNews received the following from the Peace and Justice Project Skem. We have shared the below in full:

While we are in the midst of the deepest health crisis in decades, the Conservatives have launched a dangerous NHS Bill. The Health and Care Bill should really be called the NHS Corporate Takeover Bill.

National and local campaign groups such as our Peace and Justice Project Skelmersdale have become increasingly concerned by the implications this Bill will have for us all and the future of our access to health and social care.

This Bill opens the door for private corporations to sit on local health boards which make critical decisions about NHS budgets and services. It also allows NHS bodies to award contracts to private healthcare providers with even less scrutiny and transparency than they do now.

This will open the door to yet more privatisation and even greater dodgy handouts to corporate mates that we have seen become all too common during the pandemic.

When the priority should be a decent pay rise for NHS staff, tackling record waiting lists and investment in both NHS and social care the government are instead looking at how to continue their stealth privatisation of the NHS.

The public overwhelmingly back the NHS being returned fully as a public service, the Bill is being spun as a way of addressing the huge failings of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act that made markets and competition central to the NHS. That’s not to say any step away from that disastrous model would be positive, but sadly this Bill is simply a way of entrenching privatisation in a different way.

This Bill does not address the worst failings of the 2012 reforms, it does drop the ridiculous competitive tendering process, but does not make it a requirement that the services are or could be delivered in-house or even that the NHS is a default option for providing healthcare services and as pointed out by Unison, the Bill does not reverse the measures that permitted NHS hospitals to increase their income from treating private patients from 2 per cent to 49 per cent of their total income.

As EveryDoctor, a doctor-led campaigning organisation highlighted, that change meant NHS hospitals began to treat private patient units using NHS staff, time, resources and equipment and with NHS patients bumped down the waiting lists. Austerity and underfunding drive the need for such private funding.

The government deny that the latest Bill is about privatisation. But their response to the pandemic shows their real ambitions. What we’ve seen with Test and Trace over the past year is what the government want to do to our whole NHS. Our NHS. They have handed over billions in funding for a sensitive public health measure to corporate giants while pretending it’s still going to our NHS. Private Test and Trace consultants getting paid thousands of pounds per day while NHS staff are offered a real-terms pay cut.

This stealth privatisation doesn’t just end with Test and Trace. An unbelievable £100bn, that’s one hundred thousand million pounds of public money has gone to non-NHS providers of healthcare over the last decade alone. Every pound spent on privatised and outsourced services is a pound less spent on our NHS.

Earlier this year, 500,000 patients had their GP services quietly passed into the hands of a US health insurance company Centene whose British subsidiary Operose UK now runs 58 GP practices and is the largest private supplier of GP services in the country. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Operose UK’s recently departed CEO Samantha Jones has just begun a role as an expert adviser to Boris Johnson on NHS transformation and social care.

And in a sign of what might be to come across the country with the new NHS Bill, Virgin Care has recently been given a seat on a local NHS decision-making body.

This is not only the wrong Bill but it comes at the wrong time. NHS staff have been through the most intense 18 months in NHS history. The Health Secretary Sajid Javid has warned that record waiting lists could even top 13 million with another Covid surge, putting further pressure on the NHS.

Any new Health and Care Bill should be about addressing the decade of Conservative health cuts and privatisations that have pushed our greatest institution to the brink.

It should be about addressing the deep staffing crisis through proper pay rises and decent conditions. There are still 40,000 nursing vacancies, an overall shortfall of 85,000 staff in NHS hospitals, mental health services and community providers and over 112,000 vacancies in social care. It should be about ending the current broken model of social care with a comprehensive National Care Service that is free and funded through general taxation. Yet social care is mentioned only in passing in this Bill.

The Government are privatising OUR NHS through the backdoor. So we need to step up the fight for the values of our NHS. The recent parliamentary vote on the new Bill is just the first stage in what needs to be a big battle for our NHS, both inside and outside of Parliament.

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