28 May 2022
The Health Care Bill recently passed through parliament. And beneath the soothing words about efficiency and patient choice, it contains some very dangerous things — clauses which further the stealth privatisation of the NHS. For many people, the worst part is that it enables representatives of private companies to sit on the boards which decide who gets NHS contracts. The risks for cronyism and corruption are obvious.
The good news is that the legislation devolves decisions about contracts to the regions. That gives us a back door to try to reduce the amount of influence the private sector has locally.
To do this, we can use a web tool created by the public ownership group WeOwnIt. The idea is to fill the inbox of the chair of the new Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICS, Prem Singh, asking for all or any of these things:
• A public commitment to exclude people who work for private medical / healthcare companies or who have a financial interest in private healthcare companies sitting on our ICB.
• A public commitment never to delegate any of the Board’s duties to commission NHS services to any bodies or committees that include people who work for or have a financial interest in private medical / healthcare companies.
• And a public commitment not to outsource or privatise any further NHS services and, when existing contracts expire, to produce a plan for returning any currently outsourced to publicly-owned services — with the goal, ultimately, to make the "real" NHS the default provider of all NHS services.
The more of us who write, the harder it will be for the ICS to dismiss the campaign. According to polls, most people in this country want what we want on this subject; 84% want the NHS fully in public ownership, 72% of people are concerned that the Health and Care Bill will mean contracts are handed out to private companies without scrutiny.
Here is our chance to get the new Board to match their policy to what we want, rather than what central government wants to give us.
To make this as easy as possible, we can use a web tool WeOwnIt created called Find My NHS — it lets you create a message to the chair of the local Boards:
1. Visit https://weownit.org.uk/find-my-nhs . (The page also contains a lot of useful background material on the NHS reorganisation and its consequences / implications if you’re interested. There’s also a really great page from Keep Your NHS Public at https://keepournhspublic.com/campaigns/scrap-the-health-and-care-bill/ .)
2. Type in your postcode.
3. What you should then see is that care locally runs through the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICS. The chair is a man named Prem Singh.
4. You can then send a copy of WeOwnIt’s letter to Prem Singh, demanding that he puts local people before private profits. Or, if you want to and have the time, you can personalise the message.