Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Blair and NHS: reforms explore new dimensions in failure

by John Lister  |  Socialist Resistance no42  |  page 4

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Tony Blair's "modernising" reforms of the NHS have conjured up a booming new, costly, private sector in health care provision, while the core public sector hospitals and health services are sent reeling from one cash squeeze and reorganisation to the next.

A new pamphlet outlining the dynamics and the implications of what it terms the "patchwork privatisation" of the NHS has just been published atter months of research by the Keep Our NHS Public campaign.

It shows that while Thatcher's privatisation state-owned utilities were high profile campaigns with mass sales of shares, the piecemeal process of hiving off key

services to private providers has been an obscure process, largely conducted behind a cloak of "confidentiality" with minimal public involvement or debate.

Especially tight secrecy has shrouded the contracts for Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) with all future decision-making now in the hands of Strategic Health Authorities which face no, local accountability to patients or public.

The Healthcare Commission recently underlined the lack of data on the clinical quality of ISTC services: but the general public is equally in the dark on the real cost of these controversial new units.

Ministers admit that the ISTs get paid an average 11.2% more than the NHS for each operation they do: but no details are published on the profits pocketed by ISTC companies at the expense of the NHS.

Similarly, the details of the £8bn worth of new hospitals to be built through the controversial Private Finance Initiative (PFI) remain under wraps, with deals signed behind closed doors and not a single unexpurgated full business case having been published.

Government figures now show the long-term cost of borrowing the £8bn capital in this way will be a staggering £53bn - £37bn in "rent" for use of the new buildings over 30-35 years, almost five times the initial cost. Had trusts been allowed to borrow as a conventional repayment mortgage at 6% they would pay back twice the cost of the initial investment - over just 25 years.