Stop NHS Privatisation
The Tories are using the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to further privatise the NHS – just when we need a publicly owned and accountable health service more than ever. Often they are using the emergency as an excuse, even dispensing with proper tendering procedures.
They have just announced that they will award £5bn to set up seven new privately run labs to test for the virus. Beneficiaries will include big pharma firms AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline.
Already four existing private ‘Lighthouse’ labs have done their bit to contribute chaos, losing thousands of samples and refusing to share data with GPs and local councils. Now the government has decided it wants more of the same
Allan Wilson, President of the Institute of Biomedical Science, commented, “The government know they’ve made mistakes and they seem determined to continue using the same model..We are campaigning for NHS labs to be allowed to bid for these contracts. This should not be exclusive to commercial partners. As an absolute minimum, whoever bids for this has to demonstrate clearly how they will integrate with the NHS, so that test results are immediately available to clinical staff and public health systems.”
Allyson Pollock, public health professor at Newcastle University, said the money should be used to build up publicly owned laboratories run by the NHS or Public HE. “This looks like a big subsidy for industry through the back door”, she declared. £5bn is a huge, mouthwatering sum.
Martin McKee, professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, queried the whole process. “The fragmentation of NHS services has been a major factor in the UK’s poor performance during this pandemic, so it is not obvious why you would want to fragment it even further.” Fair comment, surely.
Privatisation is proceeding apace. Here’s a previous instance:
https://labourrep.com/blog/2020/6/19/serco-and-the-fiasco-of-tracing-covid-19
The only beneficiaries are big business and their Tory chums. We are the losers. The rotten privatisation process needs to stop.
