We don’t need a chat, we need public ownership and decent funding

Adam Harmsworth, Coventry Socialist Party

The government has launched an online platform to receive ideas for a ‘ten-year plan’ to fix the NHS. Members of the public and organisations, including private medical companies, can take part in a ‘national conversation’ and submit ideas for reforms to the NHS. Reading the press release and health secretary Wes Streeting’s article in The Guardian expressing his supposed love for the NHS, you wouldn’t have any idea there had been a change in government.

Funding is mentioned, but as an afterthought following a dozen buzzwords we’ve heard from the Tories for over a decade. There are plans to create a ‘patient passport’, improvements from modern technology, and creating neighbourhood health centres. These would be welcome if implemented properly instead of increased avenues for companies to make profit from our ill health. But none of this will resolve the urgent crises of massive waiting lists, dangerous understaffing and under-resourcing. Neither the press release nor Streeting’s article deal with what is actually needed to reverse the horrendous state the NHS is in.

Instead of a sham ‘national conversation’ with the public, Labour could look at the 6.3 million patients on NHS waiting lists, or the thousands of unnecessary deaths of those waiting for treatment.

Labour already has a means to have a ‘national conversation’ with staff in their hundreds of thousands – though their trade unions! The NHS unions have made absolutely clear that the health service needs an urgent massive rise in funding to bring staff pay back up to at least where it was in real terms before 2010. Funding is also urgently needed to recruit staff and end the workload crisis, and to ensure they have the equipment and resources needed to do the job properly.

NHS unions have also consistently backed ending privatisation of the NHS, while Streeting and the rest of Labour are championing further private sector involvement. Privatisation, directly and through PFI (private finance initiative) schemes, is leeching money from the NHS. Money that should go towards healthcare instead goes to profit margins and shareholders’ pockets.

University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire is a sickening example. A hospital built under PFI that now pays out over £80 million a year – an eighth of its entire budget – to a private firm. Additionally, the hospital car park has its own PFI scheme raking in £7 million profit for a different private firm.

We don’t need a ‘national conversation’ to know private firms should be booted out and the NHS should receive far more funding to ensure it returns to a world-class health service. But whose voices will Labour listen to? Workers and people who need the NHS, or big business wanting to maximise their profits? Streeting and the rest of Starmer’s Labour have been clear they want more private involvement, and have insisted on ‘reform before funding’. The working class will have a real voice in this ‘conversation’ is if the NHS unions return to the picket lines to fight for the health service we need.