Future of the NHS

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Gray, and it is wonderful to hear all these passionate speeches today. We need to be clear that whether they admit it or not, the Conservatives have always had a problem with the national health service. They might try to rewrite the history books, but the truth is recorded: they voted against the creation of our national health service on more than 20 occasions, and the reason is purely ideological. They see it as an unwelcome intervention into the market, a point I will return to in a second.

Some of the more vocal supporters of that neoliberal agenda see the NHS as a last bastion of socialism in our society. I am proud that our national health service was created by socialists, and I think it is the greatest example in this country’s history of socialist principles put into practice. What does that mean? It means that there are some things in life more important than the pursuit of profit. However, what we now see—what we have seen since 2010—is an increased drive for the Americanisation of our national health service. The Conservatives want to turn it into a system where they feel for a patient’s wallet before they feel for their pulse. The truth is that however the history books are rewritten, it was a struggle to create the NHS in the first place, and it is now a great struggle to maintain it in accordance with its founding principles.

There are two key issues for our health service—deep underfunding and greater use of the private sector—and they go hand in hand, with the national health service being underfunded so that people can supposedly be persuaded to stomach greater and greater private sector involvement. First, the Conservatives defund things so that people get frustrated, and then they say that there is no choice but to hand them over to the private sector—that is the plan. We hear from the Conservatives that the staffing crisis in our national health service was caused by omicron or by covid, but the truth is that the huge vacancies and understaffing in the NHS did not start with omicron or with covid: the vacancies have been there for a long time, and now there are nearly 100,000 of them. An unbelievable £100 billion has gone to non-NHS providers of healthcare over the past decade alone. Every pound spent bolstering the private companies means less spent on people’s healthcare, as the profits are creamed off.

People out there are right to be worried about what the Conservatives want to do with the NHS. I mentioned earlier the Conservatives’ historical and ongoing objection to interventions in the market, but the truth is they believe in free markets for the 99%—with all the harm it brings them in their lives, their pay packets and their health service—but believe in intervention in the market for the benefit of those at the top. That is what we saw during the covid crisis, with all those corrupt contracts, the VIP fast-track lane, and billions of pounds going to Serco for the failed test and trace system. What the Tories did with the corrupt covid contracts, they want to do right across our national health service. That is why the Health and Care Bill would be better renamed the corporate takeover Bill. We cannot allow that to happen. The Conservatives want to create a race to the bottom, and we know that cuts and privatisation go hand in hand.

Before I finish, I will say a word about our NHS staff. We saw the Prime Minister—who no one trusts anymore, and quite rightly so—standing outside Downing Street clapping for the NHS heroes, but claps do not pay the bills. If we have a Government that values NHS staff in the way they say they do, they need to pay those staff properly. I put on the record my support for the 15% pay increase for NHS staff, who have suffered a decade of real-terms pay cuts. We need to be clear about what that means: that 15% increase would bring their pay back in line with where it was a decade ago.

What is the way forward? It is for us to realise that no Prime Minister or Government will say to the public, “Do you know what? We’re going to privatise the NHS. Do you know what? We’re going to turn it into an American-style healthcare system.” Of course they will not do that. They will manufacture consent for those changes through underfunding and through creeping privatisation carrying on at ever greater pace. It was a struggle to create our NHS, and it will be a struggle to save it from this final Americanisation. Regardless of which party we are in, history will judge us poorly if we betray those who went before us and created our national health service—the greatest achievement in our country’s history, and the greatest example of socialist principles put into practice, which may be why this Government dislike it so much.