Éoin Clarke writes:
The 'for sale' advert
you see above is the largest ever privatisation of NHS Community Health
Services in our history. Yesterday, it was put up for sale by the Tory created
Cambridgeshire & Peterborough CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group).
Before
the passing of the Tory NHS Bill a privatisation such as this would have been
impossible. Since the passing of the Tory NHS Bill more than 900 chunks of
community health have gone on sale.
Two other chunks of NHS privatisation rival
this. NHS Midlands is privatising pathology services for £700 million
(as
I reported here), and the first ever NHS Acute Hospital was privatised for
£1.4bn in a contract that took effect on 1 February 2012.
Crucially, neither of
those NHS privatisations needed the Tory NHS Bill to take place. This
sale did. The company who wins this contract would typically expect to make
about £64 million profit at taxpayers' expense from this deal.
I can assure
you, without reservation, that the winner of this contract will have shareholders who have donated to the Tory Party.
That is a solemn promise.
We can say this with such assurance because the companies capable of bidding for a contract of this size have all donated to the Tory Party.
We can say this with such assurance because the companies capable of bidding for a contract of this size have all donated to the Tory Party.
I wonder, what percentage of UK voters who cast
their vote in 2010 thought this would ever come to pass?
It's difficult to cover briefly all the ways this is wrong. But here are the most important 2.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I don't know why he claims this couldn't be done before the Health and Social Care Act. It could be. And the reason I know this is that many have been, under a programme called Traspnsforming Community Services, created under a Labour government by Andy Burnham. Examples include Suffolk, Surrey and Devon all awarded to the private sector before the Act, as well as many (Trafford, Central Surrey Health) that have gone to other NHS bodies or social enterprises.
Secondly, his point on shareholders. He may well be right, because companies this size have thousands and thousands of shareholders. The odds that in each one of them, at least one has indeed donated to the Tories, are pretty large.
But here's the thing. He segues, oh so neatly, from "shareholders" donating, to "companies" donating. Which of course, is totally different (which he knows, because to paraphrase CJ Cregg, he's stupid, but he's not stupid). And on the latter, I'm sure that he's factually wrong. Capita, one of the likely bidders I'd guess, has not. Neither has Serco, another likely bidder. I found this out through the complicated method of looking the companies up in the Electoral Commission register, which took me all of a minute.
Given Eoin's, ahem, mixed track record when it comes to writing about private companies in the health space *cough cough, Virgin Care, cough*, I would have thought he might have written future posts more carefully