Health Campaigns Together
Joint statement – Challenging the STPs
As amended and agreed by 150 campaigners attending Health Campaigns Together conference, Birmingham
17th September 2016
As campaigners across England, we are sounding the alarm over the potential impact on health care services of the 44 Sustainability & Transformation Plans being drawn up in secret at the behest of NHS England.
Drafts of all 44 plans were submitted in July: but as of this weekend only 6 relatively complete drafts have been published – for North West London, Hampshire and Isle of Wight, Dorset, the Black Country, Wider Devon and Shropshire.
These plans all centre on achieving drastic "efficiency" savings, to stave off projected "gaps" between needs and resources reaching into hundreds of millions of pounds.
The North West London draft makes clear that most of the core savings are to come from old fashioned cuts – closing hospitals, centralising services, squeezing more "productivity" from already hard-pressed hospital staff, redundancies and dumping more unpaid tasks onto GPs and primary care services, as well as onto family carers, overwhelmingly women.
The proposed new models of "out of hospital care" will also open the door to selling off NHS estate to fund the NHS deficit, as well as further privatisation – contracting out for US-style "accountable care partnerships" and for "Multispecialty Community Providers". We do not oppose genuine integration of health and social care but reject any moves towards "innovations" that involve replacing highly trained professional staff with fewer, cheaper, lower skilled staff, or contracting out or privatisation of health care provision. We note the current disastrous fragmentation, underfunding and widespread privatisation of social care, making a comprehensive integrated service impossible.
We note the impact and partial victories that have been won by broad-based campaigns in various areas – defending Manchester mental health, in Shropshire challenging the ‘Future fit’ proposals, in Staffordshire & Cambridgeshire exposing "lead provider" contracts, in NW London linking with two boroughs to fight closures, and more – and the success of campaigners in mobilising large protests in Bristol, Huddersfield, and Banbury.
We welcome the courageous stand that has been made in NW London by Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham councils, refusing to sign up to an STP that would close important local hospitals – and urge other local councils to take a similar stand wherever services are at risk.
The relentless squeeze on funding, initiated in 2010 by George Osborne, is set to continue until 2020, freezing health spending in real terms and effectively each year falling behind the increases in population and upward cost pressures on the NHS.
The delegates here oppose the STP plans as fundamentally flawed, driven by cuts and by undemocratic NHS managers. We believe they will further fragment and privatise the NHS.
We call for
· The full re-instatement of a comprehensive, universal, publicly funded, publicly owned, publicly provided and publicly accountable, national health service which is free at the point of use and has the resources needed to provide excellent health care for all on a long term, sustainable basis.
· Immediate publication of all 44 draft STPs and a full and comprehensive public consultation on their proposals
· A halt to the cash squeeze and for additional government funding, from progressive taxation, to restore the real terms budget of the NHS.
· Councils to refuse to sign up to STPs until a satisfactory conclusion to the public consultation is reached, and work with the local public to develop clear red lines around all NHS services.
We will seek to work cooperatively
· With trade unions and other partners to increase the level of awareness among health workers, professional bodies and health trade unions of the dangers of STPs. It is clear from the STP Drafts that the bulk of future savings are to come from closures, job losses and further demands on NHS staff, whose real terms wages have already been reduced by upwards of 16% since 2010.
· With broad based campaigns within communities, encouraging links with health workers in hospitals, primary care, community and other settings in defence of their jobs, pay, safe staffing levels and conditions.
· With political Parties at local and national level to build active campaigning.
We will build STP Watch as a resource and build the broadest possible united campaign to prevent STPs undermining access to local services and the quality and quantity of health & social care for all.
· We will organise a national day of local action in opposition to STPs.
· We also support the struggle of the junior doctors against the contract being imposed on them by NHS England. They are in the forefront of the fight to defend the conditions of service of all public sector workers within the NHS.
STP Conference, Health Campaigns Together.
17th September 2016
www.healthcampaignstogether.com
[email protected]
Transformation:
NHS: from devo pilots to entire Transformation in three months.
Carol Ackroyd (Hackney Keep Our NHS Public)
22 March 2016
At the start of 2016, we learned there were to be NHS devolution pilots in half a dozen areas of England. In March, and with not the slightest peep from the media, we discover the whole of the English NHS is undergoing ‘Transformation’. Massive transformation. A complete, total, reorganisation that will end the existing approach to planning and commissioning by individual CCGs and ‘transform’ much, much more.
Every NHS body and local authority has become part of one of 44 new ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plan footprints’ covering the whole of England – including 5 for Greater London. These are “geographic areas in which people and organisations will work together to develop robust plans to transform the way that health and care is planned and delivered for their populations”. Each comprises around 4 or 5 CCGs, regional or local authorities and an average population of 1.2m. The subsume existing Devo NHS pilots.
The Guidance is reassuringly bland, talking blithely of ‘strengthening local relationships’ and building on ‘local energy and enthusiasm’ to achieve ‘genuine and sustainable transformation in patient experience and health outcomes’ and the like. Some have interpreted this as the dawn of a new era of collaboration, shorn of the pressures of the NHS market which is not mentioned in the guidance. But they are wrong. Very, very, wrong. The 5-year STPs contains some very specific requirements that will test these new collaborations to the limits and usher in a vast new wave of privatisations and huge budget cuts.
The 2016-17 NHSE Planning Guidance[1] requires the CCG, local authority and other partners to agree a five-year Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP)[2] by the end of June 2016. Critically, these plans MUST include proposals to:
Eliminating the NHS deficit
England spends far less on health than most comparable economies – 7% of GDP compared with around 11% in Germany, France and Switzerland, and 16% in the USA[4]. NHS costs and demand have risen sharply since 2010, while budgets have been very tightly constrained. This has resulted in trusts facing a 2015-16 end-of-year deficit of £2.5bn. We cannot allow politicians to continue to say the NHS is overspent. The reality is, it is grossly underfunded.
Government and NHS England are determined to cut the NHS down to its budget size, and they will be looking to local authority partners in Transformation areas to help do this. Local authorities have extensive experience of cutting services: they have slashed spending on social care by 26% between 2011-2014[5] resulting in 400,000 fewer people getting care services than in 2009-10 and many more receiving fewer hours of care[6]. This has led to concerns about the near collapse of social care. Despite this, we hear near-universal boasts from Labour as well as Tory authorities that ‘front-line services have been protected’. The Government is looking for similar miracles with the NHS.
To achieve financial balance, STPs must set out the mixture of ‘demand moderation’ (ie reducing the number of patients), ‘allocative efficiency’, ‘provider productivity’ (cuts to provider budgets), and income generation required for the NHS locally to balance its books. The ‘income generation’ component is of particularly concern, given that NHS hospitals can now generate 49% of their income from private patients.
Meanwhile the NHS Partners Network (a trade association for independent sector providers of NHS services) is gearing up to assist Transformation areas to ‘supplement publicly available capital funding with external investment’ (no doubt building on successful experience such as PFI schemes to develop sparkling new buildings saddled with decades of eye-wateringly burdensome and extortionate repayments).
Where STPs fail to achieve a balanced budget, Transformation areas will be denied access to very significant pots of Transformation funding (which from this year includes all additional NHS funding streams). This is a massive penalty, and a huge incentive to meet the budget targets, however challenging.
New models for NHS provision
STPs must also look to develop new models of care as set out in the NHSE 5YFV. There is no research or clinical evidence to back these models, simply authoritative statements that this is the future for the NHS. No matter that NHS ‘Vanguard’ pilots of these new models of care were only agreed in April 2015 so have barely begun their work.
One new models asserts that England can reduce demand for hospital beds by providing digital monitoring backed by healthcare visits at home. Never mind that England has fewer beds than any comparable economy: Germany has 9 hospital beds per 1,000 population compared with 3 per 1,000 in England. Never mind the absence of rigorous clinical evidence for this model, or that it means thousands of carers – predominantly women – having to care for very sick children and family members at home. The beds will be deleted in the STP and hospitals will close.
Another 5YFV model proposes expansion of urgent care services. What it doesn’t spell out is that ‘urgent care services’ are destined to replace full Accident and Emergency services at many hospitals. This will lead to reductions in the backup diagnostic and treatment services required for a full A&E service, with consequent loss of routine health services at the hospital. Patients will have to travel much further to access these services.
STPs will also address the NHS estate (NHS buildings) in their patch. Surplus estate is to be sold off at full market value, with much of it used for private housing in areas of housing need. NHS Estates are managed centrally; there is no agreement that money from sales will even be transferred to Transformation footprints.
The NHS market continues to flourish
At a stroke, and again without the fuss of legislative change, public consultation or media attention, Transformation footprints abolish the sharp purchaser-provider division. This will do nothing to end the NHS market. Alongside Transformation, the NHS market and privatisation of profitable services will continue to flourish, only now with a plethora of purchasers and sub-contracting arrangements, unconstrained by a sole purchaser. Requirements to redesign services using new models of care from the 5YFV will provide huge opportunities for private sector involvement.
‘NHS Partners’, the new terminology for private providers or corporates, are enthusing about their ability to deliver new services in line with 5YFV models, for instance, ‘delivering mobile capacity across diagnostic and treatment areas’, ‘providing clinical home healthcare and care home capacity to support patient discharge and avoid unnecessary hospital admissions’, and ‘offering management and strategic capacity, as well as procurement and planning skills needed to develop STPs’ and more.
Moving services out of hospital and integration with social care will open opportunities for new providers to deliver services with cheaper, non-clinical, staff as well as moving these services into - chargeable - social care. Healthcare corporations will jump at the chance to provide home-based digital monitoring alternatives to hospital care.
The changes will open up opportunities for a single provider to deliver the entire complex of health and social care services in one locality, a model that is particularly attractive to giant US Healthcare corporations which already deliver these models in the US.
Private providers will be keen to provide back-office functions for the new Transformation especially if this gives them access to patient data that is useful as a basis for trialling specialist medicine, lifestyle apps, for use by big pharm or as a basis for private health insurance for those hoping to sidestep increasingly diminishing NHS services.
Property consultants will be needed to map and draw up plans for ‘surplus’ NHS estates, and develop proposals for newly rationalised and integrated services within the transformation plan.
Private consultancies will be engaged to draw up the STPs in time to meet the June 2016 deadline to access vital Transformation funding. Unobstructed by clinicians and coal-face managers, consultancies will deliver glossy plans that match the non-evidence-based and unrealisable aspirations of the 5YFV.
Starry-eyed or dazed local authority, NHS managers and Health, Wellbeing Boards, clinicians, patients and public health analysts will look on as the five-year plans for completely transformed services, with no evidence base and with budgets pared beyond recognition, are developed with ‘NHS Partners’ and transmitted to NHSE by the deadline of June 2016.
And unless campaigners can really get our act together, the public won’t have a clue that any of this is happening.
Campaigners will need to do everything in their power to oppose ‘Transformation’ and demand:
The NHS is hugely popular among every sector of the population. If the public were properly informed there would be overwhelming support for the NHS Bill which was introduced in 2015 by Green MP Caroline Lucas, with cross-party support from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, the SNP and Lord David Owen among others. The NHS Bill would reinstate a publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly accountable NHS, end the NHS market and bring services currently provided by private companies back into public ownership and control. It would will restore a co-operative, integrated NHS, run for patients not for profit. It would ensure that decisions about services can be made on the basis of research evidence of clinical need.
The Bill had a second reading on 11th March 2016, when it was talked out by filibustering Tory MPs. Many Labour MPs refused to back the bill on the grounds that it would require another ‘top down reorganisation’ to develop the multi-agency place-based Health Boards at the heart of the Bill. Ironically, the Transformation footprint localities will serve very well as a basis for the Health Boards required by the Bill!
If passed, the Bill would put a complete end to the Transformation agenda that imposes huge untested changes to service models and opens the NHS to a new rush of privatisation.
Campaigners need to do everything within our power to demand that our MPs support this new law to reinstate the NHS, starting with demands on political parties and trades unions to campaign actively for the Bill. Campaigners have developed a motion for Trades Union and party branches, demanding leaders campaign actively at every level for the NHS Bill. If we want an NHS for the future, we must demand urgent action from our politicians now before the NHS is finally transformed out of all recognition.
Carol Ackroyd
(Hackney KONP )
22 March 2016
[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/futurenhs/deliver-forward-view/
[2] https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/stp-footprints-march-2016.pdf
[3]https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwinrvy0l83LAhXD1hQKHWPvCrgQFggqMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.england.nhs.uk%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F10%2F5yfv-web.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFzTIHc_bEhet1F-flojMoZ08seZQ&sig2=qT4CqbkGgNxXws-maCMK3Q&bvm=bv.117218890,d.ZWU
[4] http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT
[5]http://www.local.gov.uk/documents/10180/5854661/Adult+social+care+funding+2014+state+of+the+nation+report/e32866fa-d512-4e77-9961-8861d2d93238
[6]http://www.adass.org.uk/uploadedFiles/adass_content/policy_networks/resources/Key_documents/ADASS%20Budget%20Survey%202015%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
Joint statement – Challenging the STPs
As amended and agreed by 150 campaigners attending Health Campaigns Together conference, Birmingham
17th September 2016
As campaigners across England, we are sounding the alarm over the potential impact on health care services of the 44 Sustainability & Transformation Plans being drawn up in secret at the behest of NHS England.
Drafts of all 44 plans were submitted in July: but as of this weekend only 6 relatively complete drafts have been published – for North West London, Hampshire and Isle of Wight, Dorset, the Black Country, Wider Devon and Shropshire.
These plans all centre on achieving drastic "efficiency" savings, to stave off projected "gaps" between needs and resources reaching into hundreds of millions of pounds.
The North West London draft makes clear that most of the core savings are to come from old fashioned cuts – closing hospitals, centralising services, squeezing more "productivity" from already hard-pressed hospital staff, redundancies and dumping more unpaid tasks onto GPs and primary care services, as well as onto family carers, overwhelmingly women.
The proposed new models of "out of hospital care" will also open the door to selling off NHS estate to fund the NHS deficit, as well as further privatisation – contracting out for US-style "accountable care partnerships" and for "Multispecialty Community Providers". We do not oppose genuine integration of health and social care but reject any moves towards "innovations" that involve replacing highly trained professional staff with fewer, cheaper, lower skilled staff, or contracting out or privatisation of health care provision. We note the current disastrous fragmentation, underfunding and widespread privatisation of social care, making a comprehensive integrated service impossible.
We note the impact and partial victories that have been won by broad-based campaigns in various areas – defending Manchester mental health, in Shropshire challenging the ‘Future fit’ proposals, in Staffordshire & Cambridgeshire exposing "lead provider" contracts, in NW London linking with two boroughs to fight closures, and more – and the success of campaigners in mobilising large protests in Bristol, Huddersfield, and Banbury.
We welcome the courageous stand that has been made in NW London by Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham councils, refusing to sign up to an STP that would close important local hospitals – and urge other local councils to take a similar stand wherever services are at risk.
The relentless squeeze on funding, initiated in 2010 by George Osborne, is set to continue until 2020, freezing health spending in real terms and effectively each year falling behind the increases in population and upward cost pressures on the NHS.
The delegates here oppose the STP plans as fundamentally flawed, driven by cuts and by undemocratic NHS managers. We believe they will further fragment and privatise the NHS.
We call for
· The full re-instatement of a comprehensive, universal, publicly funded, publicly owned, publicly provided and publicly accountable, national health service which is free at the point of use and has the resources needed to provide excellent health care for all on a long term, sustainable basis.
· Immediate publication of all 44 draft STPs and a full and comprehensive public consultation on their proposals
· A halt to the cash squeeze and for additional government funding, from progressive taxation, to restore the real terms budget of the NHS.
· Councils to refuse to sign up to STPs until a satisfactory conclusion to the public consultation is reached, and work with the local public to develop clear red lines around all NHS services.
We will seek to work cooperatively
· With trade unions and other partners to increase the level of awareness among health workers, professional bodies and health trade unions of the dangers of STPs. It is clear from the STP Drafts that the bulk of future savings are to come from closures, job losses and further demands on NHS staff, whose real terms wages have already been reduced by upwards of 16% since 2010.
· With broad based campaigns within communities, encouraging links with health workers in hospitals, primary care, community and other settings in defence of their jobs, pay, safe staffing levels and conditions.
· With political Parties at local and national level to build active campaigning.
We will build STP Watch as a resource and build the broadest possible united campaign to prevent STPs undermining access to local services and the quality and quantity of health & social care for all.
· We will organise a national day of local action in opposition to STPs.
· We also support the struggle of the junior doctors against the contract being imposed on them by NHS England. They are in the forefront of the fight to defend the conditions of service of all public sector workers within the NHS.
STP Conference, Health Campaigns Together.
17th September 2016
www.healthcampaignstogether.com
[email protected]
Transformation:
NHS: from devo pilots to entire Transformation in three months.
Carol Ackroyd (Hackney Keep Our NHS Public)
22 March 2016
At the start of 2016, we learned there were to be NHS devolution pilots in half a dozen areas of England. In March, and with not the slightest peep from the media, we discover the whole of the English NHS is undergoing ‘Transformation’. Massive transformation. A complete, total, reorganisation that will end the existing approach to planning and commissioning by individual CCGs and ‘transform’ much, much more.
Every NHS body and local authority has become part of one of 44 new ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plan footprints’ covering the whole of England – including 5 for Greater London. These are “geographic areas in which people and organisations will work together to develop robust plans to transform the way that health and care is planned and delivered for their populations”. Each comprises around 4 or 5 CCGs, regional or local authorities and an average population of 1.2m. The subsume existing Devo NHS pilots.
The Guidance is reassuringly bland, talking blithely of ‘strengthening local relationships’ and building on ‘local energy and enthusiasm’ to achieve ‘genuine and sustainable transformation in patient experience and health outcomes’ and the like. Some have interpreted this as the dawn of a new era of collaboration, shorn of the pressures of the NHS market which is not mentioned in the guidance. But they are wrong. Very, very, wrong. The 5-year STPs contains some very specific requirements that will test these new collaborations to the limits and usher in a vast new wave of privatisations and huge budget cuts.
The 2016-17 NHSE Planning Guidance[1] requires the CCG, local authority and other partners to agree a five-year Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP)[2] by the end of June 2016. Critically, these plans MUST include proposals to:
- bring their Transformation footprint into financial balance (eliminating at a stroke the NHS deficit)
- achieve this by implementing new models of care as set out in the NHSE Five Year Forward View[3].
Eliminating the NHS deficit
England spends far less on health than most comparable economies – 7% of GDP compared with around 11% in Germany, France and Switzerland, and 16% in the USA[4]. NHS costs and demand have risen sharply since 2010, while budgets have been very tightly constrained. This has resulted in trusts facing a 2015-16 end-of-year deficit of £2.5bn. We cannot allow politicians to continue to say the NHS is overspent. The reality is, it is grossly underfunded.
Government and NHS England are determined to cut the NHS down to its budget size, and they will be looking to local authority partners in Transformation areas to help do this. Local authorities have extensive experience of cutting services: they have slashed spending on social care by 26% between 2011-2014[5] resulting in 400,000 fewer people getting care services than in 2009-10 and many more receiving fewer hours of care[6]. This has led to concerns about the near collapse of social care. Despite this, we hear near-universal boasts from Labour as well as Tory authorities that ‘front-line services have been protected’. The Government is looking for similar miracles with the NHS.
To achieve financial balance, STPs must set out the mixture of ‘demand moderation’ (ie reducing the number of patients), ‘allocative efficiency’, ‘provider productivity’ (cuts to provider budgets), and income generation required for the NHS locally to balance its books. The ‘income generation’ component is of particularly concern, given that NHS hospitals can now generate 49% of their income from private patients.
Meanwhile the NHS Partners Network (a trade association for independent sector providers of NHS services) is gearing up to assist Transformation areas to ‘supplement publicly available capital funding with external investment’ (no doubt building on successful experience such as PFI schemes to develop sparkling new buildings saddled with decades of eye-wateringly burdensome and extortionate repayments).
Where STPs fail to achieve a balanced budget, Transformation areas will be denied access to very significant pots of Transformation funding (which from this year includes all additional NHS funding streams). This is a massive penalty, and a huge incentive to meet the budget targets, however challenging.
New models for NHS provision
STPs must also look to develop new models of care as set out in the NHSE 5YFV. There is no research or clinical evidence to back these models, simply authoritative statements that this is the future for the NHS. No matter that NHS ‘Vanguard’ pilots of these new models of care were only agreed in April 2015 so have barely begun their work.
One new models asserts that England can reduce demand for hospital beds by providing digital monitoring backed by healthcare visits at home. Never mind that England has fewer beds than any comparable economy: Germany has 9 hospital beds per 1,000 population compared with 3 per 1,000 in England. Never mind the absence of rigorous clinical evidence for this model, or that it means thousands of carers – predominantly women – having to care for very sick children and family members at home. The beds will be deleted in the STP and hospitals will close.
Another 5YFV model proposes expansion of urgent care services. What it doesn’t spell out is that ‘urgent care services’ are destined to replace full Accident and Emergency services at many hospitals. This will lead to reductions in the backup diagnostic and treatment services required for a full A&E service, with consequent loss of routine health services at the hospital. Patients will have to travel much further to access these services.
STPs will also address the NHS estate (NHS buildings) in their patch. Surplus estate is to be sold off at full market value, with much of it used for private housing in areas of housing need. NHS Estates are managed centrally; there is no agreement that money from sales will even be transferred to Transformation footprints.
The NHS market continues to flourish
At a stroke, and again without the fuss of legislative change, public consultation or media attention, Transformation footprints abolish the sharp purchaser-provider division. This will do nothing to end the NHS market. Alongside Transformation, the NHS market and privatisation of profitable services will continue to flourish, only now with a plethora of purchasers and sub-contracting arrangements, unconstrained by a sole purchaser. Requirements to redesign services using new models of care from the 5YFV will provide huge opportunities for private sector involvement.
‘NHS Partners’, the new terminology for private providers or corporates, are enthusing about their ability to deliver new services in line with 5YFV models, for instance, ‘delivering mobile capacity across diagnostic and treatment areas’, ‘providing clinical home healthcare and care home capacity to support patient discharge and avoid unnecessary hospital admissions’, and ‘offering management and strategic capacity, as well as procurement and planning skills needed to develop STPs’ and more.
Moving services out of hospital and integration with social care will open opportunities for new providers to deliver services with cheaper, non-clinical, staff as well as moving these services into - chargeable - social care. Healthcare corporations will jump at the chance to provide home-based digital monitoring alternatives to hospital care.
The changes will open up opportunities for a single provider to deliver the entire complex of health and social care services in one locality, a model that is particularly attractive to giant US Healthcare corporations which already deliver these models in the US.
Private providers will be keen to provide back-office functions for the new Transformation especially if this gives them access to patient data that is useful as a basis for trialling specialist medicine, lifestyle apps, for use by big pharm or as a basis for private health insurance for those hoping to sidestep increasingly diminishing NHS services.
Property consultants will be needed to map and draw up plans for ‘surplus’ NHS estates, and develop proposals for newly rationalised and integrated services within the transformation plan.
Private consultancies will be engaged to draw up the STPs in time to meet the June 2016 deadline to access vital Transformation funding. Unobstructed by clinicians and coal-face managers, consultancies will deliver glossy plans that match the non-evidence-based and unrealisable aspirations of the 5YFV.
Starry-eyed or dazed local authority, NHS managers and Health, Wellbeing Boards, clinicians, patients and public health analysts will look on as the five-year plans for completely transformed services, with no evidence base and with budgets pared beyond recognition, are developed with ‘NHS Partners’ and transmitted to NHSE by the deadline of June 2016.
And unless campaigners can really get our act together, the public won’t have a clue that any of this is happening.
Campaigners will need to do everything in their power to oppose ‘Transformation’ and demand:
- NHSE and Government withdraw requirements for STPs pending further public debate.
- NHS funding be brought immediately up to levels of EU average of GDP spend – reversing the decline since 2010
- All changes to local services must be based firmly on clinical need and evidence-based research of proposed models
- Enact the NHS Bill that will end privatisation – as set out below.
The NHS is hugely popular among every sector of the population. If the public were properly informed there would be overwhelming support for the NHS Bill which was introduced in 2015 by Green MP Caroline Lucas, with cross-party support from Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, the SNP and Lord David Owen among others. The NHS Bill would reinstate a publicly funded, publicly provided and publicly accountable NHS, end the NHS market and bring services currently provided by private companies back into public ownership and control. It would will restore a co-operative, integrated NHS, run for patients not for profit. It would ensure that decisions about services can be made on the basis of research evidence of clinical need.
The Bill had a second reading on 11th March 2016, when it was talked out by filibustering Tory MPs. Many Labour MPs refused to back the bill on the grounds that it would require another ‘top down reorganisation’ to develop the multi-agency place-based Health Boards at the heart of the Bill. Ironically, the Transformation footprint localities will serve very well as a basis for the Health Boards required by the Bill!
If passed, the Bill would put a complete end to the Transformation agenda that imposes huge untested changes to service models and opens the NHS to a new rush of privatisation.
Campaigners need to do everything within our power to demand that our MPs support this new law to reinstate the NHS, starting with demands on political parties and trades unions to campaign actively for the Bill. Campaigners have developed a motion for Trades Union and party branches, demanding leaders campaign actively at every level for the NHS Bill. If we want an NHS for the future, we must demand urgent action from our politicians now before the NHS is finally transformed out of all recognition.
Carol Ackroyd
(Hackney KONP )
22 March 2016
[1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/futurenhs/deliver-forward-view/
[2] https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/stp-footprints-march-2016.pdf
[3]https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwinrvy0l83LAhXD1hQKHWPvCrgQFggqMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.england.nhs.uk%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F10%2F5yfv-web.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFzTIHc_bEhet1F-flojMoZ08seZQ&sig2=qT4CqbkGgNxXws-maCMK3Q&bvm=bv.117218890,d.ZWU
[4] http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_STAT
[5]http://www.local.gov.uk/documents/10180/5854661/Adult+social+care+funding+2014+state+of+the+nation+report/e32866fa-d512-4e77-9961-8861d2d93238
[6]http://www.adass.org.uk/uploadedFiles/adass_content/policy_networks/resources/Key_documents/ADASS%20Budget%20Survey%202015%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
