NHS Outsourcing and Privatisation — House of Commons, 2018-05-23
Topic: Health
Karen Elizabeth Lee (Labour, Centre-left): After eight years of the Government’s austerity agenda, the NHS is on its knees. People in Lincoln commonly wait hours for an ambulance, including those having a heart attack. If a Health Minister happens to be in Lincoln any time soon, they might want to ask about that, because call-to-balloon times for PCI have increased. I am not scaremongering—that is the truth. I am sorry, but I will not pretend that—pardon the pun—everything is rosy Although the austerity experiment has been discredited by various economists, we have not seen a halt or a reversal of the underfunding and privatisation of our NHS. With the NHS approaching its 70th birthday, the Government are not providing it with the funding and resourcing it desperately needs. Despite the Government telling us that they are putting record amounts of money into the NHS, compared with countries such as Germany and France, we spend a considerably smaller percentage of our GDP on healthcare The latest King’s Fund research confirmed the bleak picture of the policies of the past eight years. The NHS has among the lowest levels of doctors, nurses and beds in the western world. This is not scaremongering; it is the reality of the past eight years’ effect on the health service. I am sorry if people do not like hearing it, but it is the truth. The question should not be why the NHS does not perform better compared with other countries, but rather how the NHS copes under immense pressure when it is so under-resourced. Remember, this is at a time when the Government are prioritising tax cuts for the wealthy and for large corporations Deregulation under the Health and Social Care Act 2012 is a stain on this country’s long respect and support for our NHS. There is no role for the private sector if the NHS is fully resourced. Outsourcing has led to nearly two thirds of clinical contracts being won by non-NHS providers. The NHS should not be a cash cow available to the highest bidder. The financial pressures on the NHS have forced some firms to leave the market, while others search for short-term cheap fixes to deliver contracts, which ultimately impacts on patient care It is clear that the Government have a not very well hidden agenda: slash, trash and privatise. Underfunding, with little sign of change over the past eight years, only raises the question: do the Government actually want a nationally run service that provides free healthcare to all, free at the point of service? My constituents, after the closure of our walk-in centre—against the wishes of 94% of people who said they wanted it to stay open—are not convinced. The sustainability and transformation partnerships, wholly owned subsidiaries and accountable care organisations are all a ploy for their ideological goal: the backdoor privatisation of our service. I have seen that at first hand from the hospital floor as a nurse. Instead of just words of praise for those working in the health service—praising nurses sounds really cheap, you know, as if Conservative Members can take some sort of credit for it; it is their hard work, not yours—why not provide them with the resources to do their job properly? Rewards come with actions, not just words.