Health and Social Care Levy

Janet Daby Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

We have heard—mainly from Opposition Members—about the grave issues with and concerns about this NHS tax, which will be detrimental and cause more hardship, especially to young people and poorer people in our society. We have heard about the cuts to local authorities and universal credit, and now the increase in national insurance, which will hit poorer people in our society. How can that be right?

Let me turn my focus to the Government’s progressing efforts to privatise the NHS. NHS privatisation has been a creeping threat for the past decade. The Government make a song and dance about valuing the NHS every election time. This includes their broken promises to build 40 new hospitals and to spend £350 million on the NHS every week if we left the European Union. The Prime Minister has consistently pulled the wool over the trusting public’s eyes, abusing their loyalty to the country’s most beloved asset. He is fixated on the pandemic, yet somehow the Government seem to have amnesia. There were extensive waiting lists at record high levels even before the pandemic. Those levels are even higher now. The Tories cut 17,000 beds from the NHS before the pandemic struck. The way that the Government are betraying and misleading the nation is astonishing.

Two constituents recently wrote to me about their dismay at the way in which the Government are dismantling the health service, and I have to agree. The Government have exploited the chaos of the pandemic to advance their agenda of privatisation with minimal public knowledge. There has been more outsourcing of NHS services to private companies. Public money is spent on contracts, rather than being spent directly on the NHS.

Should the Health and Care Bill pass as written, in April we will enter a new phase, where the NHS will be broken down into dozens of smaller units that will have private companies on their boards, including American health insurance companies seeking only profit. The deputy chair of the British Medical Association wrote last year:

“rather than finding a moment of clarity in this crisis to reinvest in a publicly provided health service and build for a better future, the Government has doubled down on its failures, choosing to throw huge amounts of money at scores of private firms…rather than rebuilding the health and care system and empowering those with the greatest expertise.”

What we are left with is a fragmented healthcare system that is a skeleton of what it once was, with workers underpaid and exhausted, and social care neglected.

Now the Prime Minister wants all taxpayers, including the most financially insecure, to pay for his mistakes—this Government’s mistakes. It is shameful. It is a betrayal of the NHS and a betrayal of the British people, and it is something that the Opposition will certainly not accept.