Privatisation of NHS Services

Laura Smith Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)]

Hundreds of my constituents in Crewe and Nantwich signed this petition because they want their Government to put people before profit. Fourteen hospital trusts have had to trigger emergency contingency plans and delay hospital building because of the collapse of Carillion earlier this year. Given that Capita’s annual losses are rocketing, does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s response shows that they remain dangerously obsessed with privatisation in our NHS?

[Mike Hill]

I agree. As I said, it is estimated that, over the next three years, up to £10 billion-worth of NHS contracts will go to the private sector, including the provider that my hon. Friend mentions.

Are such fears irrational or are people right to be concerned about the privatisation of NHS services, given the fact that the influence of private healthcare providers has risen sharply in recent decades? The use of the private sector has been progressed by successive Governments over many years. The present Government blame Labour for introducing private finance initiatives, which they say have burdened the NHS with eye-watering debts, but the Government compounded the problem through PF2. They also blame Labour for opening up the NHS to marketisation by splitting primary care trusts into commissioning and provider arms, and introducing the concept of “any preferred provider” in its transforming community services programme, even though the Secretary of State at the time, Andy Burnham, expressly stated that the NHS would always be the preferred provider of services. Yet from 2010 onwards this Government extended that model, creating clinical commissioning groups and pursuing competition and commercialisation with renewed vigour. Today, therefore, many traditional public health services are run by private providers such as Virgin Care and GP consortiums in their own right—services such as out-of-hours urgent care, sexual health and mental health residential care.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 was designed to bring in a far greater private sector element to the NHS through expansion of the internal market. Since then, the privatisation picture has been more mixed than had been feared, not only as a result of campaigns by Unison, the GMB and others, but because various Government initiatives to boost privatisation fell flat. However, there is still significant evidence of increasing privatisation, with companies such as Virgin, Serco and Spire continuing to prosper.