Privatisation of NHS Services

Debate between Richard Graham and Stephen Pound

Monday 23rd April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Perhaps we should start with what we agree on, which seems to me fundamental for all of us in Parliament: the NHS is more precious than perhaps any institution except our monarchy and democracy. We all agree that it is and should remain a public institution available to everyone, no matter what they earn, and free at the point of delivery. We absolutely agree on those tenets of the NHS and the health services that our constituents benefit from. However, there are also things that we disagree on.

I suggest that the debate has frankly more to do with imminent local elections in London and elsewhere than with the health of the national health service. It is at least the fourth time in my short eight years in Parliament that the left, or some of the left, have tried to weaponise the NHS. When I hear Labour MPs talking as the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker) did about the “dismantling” of the NHS, I say to them that if the Conservatives had ever intended to privatise the NHS it would have been done by now, for the Conservatives have been the party of government for much longer than Labour since 1948. Secondly, privatisation of the NHS has never been in a Conservative manifesto. I defy any Opposition Member to find a single Conservative Member of Parliament who would want it, although it is normally possible to find one MP to sign up to most things. There is a challenge to Labour MPs, and particularly to those new ones who have known only the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as their leader. If anyone really believes that real privatisation is anything more than a fantasy threat, I ask them please to go and find a single Member of Parliament from the Conservative party Back Benches who would support it.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman and have come to admire him over the years, but clearly he has not visited a hospital lately and seen privatised portering services, privatised catering services, privatised nurses being provided by privatised banks, privatised doctors being provided by privatised agencies, and patients being delivered by privatised hospital car services. I suggest he should pop down to Ealing Hospital while it is still standing. I will show him the true horror of privatisation. It is prevalent, endemic and everywhere.

[Richard Graham]

That is an interesting point, but the hon. Gentleman may not be aware that I volunteer in my local hospital, and have done for the past eight years. I have not only seen porters in action; I have worked alongside them—and ditto for a variety of wards. The situation he paints about what goes on in Ealing is completely different from what happens at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in my constituency, where those services are carried out by employees of the NHS—and will continue to be, whether they are in a subsidiary company or not—effectively and well. I pay tribute to all four of the NHS trusts in my constituency, one of which, Gloucestershire Care Services, received a good rating, alongside the already highly rated ²gether mental health trust. I shall put that issue to one side, but the hon. Gentleman is a distinguished Member of the House and knows better than to scaremonger about privatisation. Real privatisation is what happens in America, as he knows. It does not exist here in the United Kingdom.

The narrative today is, I am afraid, about scaremongering, with the favourite Labour bogeyman, privatisation, to the fore. There is one sentence from the petition that in a sense gives it away:

“Companies should not be profiteering from NHS contracts”.

The logic of that is that every single provider of equipment or services to the NHS, from pencils to EpiPens to imaging machinery to software, should do so at a loss. They should not. It is crucial that businesses make profits, invest and innovate for the future, reduce paperwork, increase scientific solutions to all sorts of difficult health issues and improve the life chances of our constituents. The opposite logic, of businesses making no money at all and going bankrupt, and the state trying to do everything, has been tested to death—literally—in both Russia and China. If Opposition Members, as socialists, want to understand why China has been so successful, I commend to them joining my all-party parliamentary China group, to visit China and understand what socialism with Chinese characteristics looks like and means.