Trade Deals and the NHS

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on having secured this important debate.

This Government have repeatedly asked the public—even today, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) asked them again—to blindly trust their promise that the NHS will not be for sale in any future trade deals with the US, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They have repeatedly been provided with opportunities to put those fears to bed, with amendments tabled to the Government’s post-Brexit trade deal explicitly stating that the NHS would be excluded from any future trade agreements. One amendment was supported by more than 400 doctors and health professionals, yet rather than deliver on their promise, not a single Conservative MP voted for the amendment, which was defeated by 89 votes.

The Government claim farcically that they voted against the amendment because it legitimises the concept of NHS privatisation, which in the realms of hypotheticals and metaphysics they claim to oppose, yet when faced with a concrete opportunity to enshrine in law the safety of our most treasured public institution, the Government sat on their hands. Now our NHS will be at the mercy of US negotiators, who are heavily influenced by the multibillion-dollar private healthcare interest in carving up our health service for corporate gain. That clearly demonstrates the Government’s commitment to ensure that the NHS is on the table during trade negotiations.

However, there is an even clearer reason why we cannot trust them—or the words of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland—when they say the NHS is not for sale. That is because they have already been selling it off, piece by piece, for the best part of a decade. Since the disastrous Health and Social Care Act 2012, NHS outsourcing and privatisation have been incentivised. Clinical commissioning groups are under pressure to outsource; in 2015, private firms won 40% of all contracts. In the last five years alone, private companies have been handed £15 billion of NHS contracts. Some 18% of healthcare bids go to private providers. It is true that the NHS logo remains and in some cases it is even co-opted by private providers, as happened with the disastrous so-called NHS Test and Trace, which is predominantly run by Serco. Yet the direction of travel under the Government has been towards a fragmented, underfunded and increasingly privatised healthcare system.

The danger of sliding towards a US-style private insurance healthcare system cannot be overstated. Research by the Commonwealth Fund in 2018 found that nearly half of working-age Americans—a staggering 87 million people—were underinsured or had no coverage at all. Rather than spending money on doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists and other professionals who provide services to people and improve their lives, the US wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year on profiteering, huge executive compensation packages and outrageous administrative costs. Despite widespread myths regarding the efficiency of the free market, the US spends nearly double what we spend on healthcare for generally worse healthcare results. That is the system that recently appointed advisers to the Secretary of State for International Trade believe is superior to our own.

It is common sense that profiteering and corporate greed should be off limits in services essential to human life. That reflects public polling that shows that 84% of Britons believe that the NHS should be in public ownership. The NHS is a gleaming beacon of human achievement—an embodiment of socialist universal principles—from which everyone, no matter what their position in society, benefits equally. It is therefore up to all of us who value healthcare as a human right to protect our most treasured public institution. It is incumbent on the Government to make their rhetoric a reality and legislate to ensure that our NHS is truly off the table and is never put up for sale.