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Forget the spin – new English NHS bill is all about cutting our right to healthcare
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Other leading health campaigners and experts – including Keep Our NHS Public, We Own It, Public Matters, John Lister, and David Rowland of the Centre for Health and Public Interest – have all raised the alarm that the substance of the recent white paper and now the bill, dumped on an exhausted NHS, an exhausted Parliament and exhausted population, appears to be being driven by principles opposite to those that are being spun. They are also entirely against the wishes of the public, who remain strongly wedded to a universal, comprehensive and publicly delivered NHS.

Power grab by the money men

The problems with the bill cannot be waved aside as minor details, to be sorted out in committees as it makes its way through Westminster.

Far from being a power grab by the health secretary as some media reports assert, the bill enables a power grab by the Treasury, the money men, the private sector and their lobbyists – one which will have terrible implications for ordinary people’s access to healthcare and the future of their local hospitals and other NHS services.

The bill and its accompanying measures impose an iron grip on costs, at least in terms of cash for local NHS services, whilst dramatically watering down the public’s rights in terms of what healthcare we will have a right to receive, where, when, and from whom, in the future.

Alongside the alarming drafting on rights to hospital care, the performance targets imposed by the bill scrap the 18-week target for waiting times, mentioning only a target of 52 weeks, for example.

Pollock and Roderick also point out that it scraps the “responsibility” the government has to arrange healthcare for each of us in England and replaces it with a – seemingly undefined, but presumably more restricted – “core responsibility” for uncertain “groups of people”. It also gives the health secretary the power to water down the requirement for staff to be properly trained and qualified.

The bill also makes it far easier for whatever government money flows into the NHS to flow straight back out again to private firms, and allows private corporations to play a huge part in shaping virtually every aspect of our healthcare.

Much of the crucial detail is left out of the bill. It instead empowers the health secretary to fill in the gaps without returning to Parliament.

And it allows him to appoint the local chairs of the new local health boards – so-called Integrated Health Boards – and allows them, in turn, to grant seats on those boards to representatives of private health and care companies.

These boards are given latitude to decide what healthcare local groups of people will and won’t receive in future, what services are kept open, which are shut or scaled back or ‘digitalised’.

The firms that could take seats on them include the likes of Centene, a US insurance and Medicaid giant rapidly expanding in England’s NHS, now the largest provider of GP services in England and with a stake in an outsourced hospital surgery firm, Circle Health. Boris Johnson recently appointed the head of Centene’s UK operation, Samathana Jones, as his senior health advisor.

Then there are firms like Babylon, which supplies digital NHS GP and 111 services across London and beyond, and is now part-owned by both Centene and controversial US tech giant Palantir. Or the private-equity-owned giants that already provide the large part of England’s mental health and care homes, and whose lobbying for inclusion on these boards looks set to bear fruit.

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