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Email a friendLifting the lid on a conspiracy
AMONG the many factors that have undermined faith in Gordon Brown's new Labour government, growing public doubts over its management of the NHS have been a substantial factor - and this new and valuable volume goes to the heart of one of the most damaging policy initiatives arising from Alan Milburn's 2000 NHS Plan.
With little or no local or national public consultation or debate and, as this new study shows, virtually no significant parliamentary or other scrutiny, ministers have committed themselves to squandering £5.6 billion of taxpayers' money on subsidising the creation of a brand new, for-profit private sector delivering elective non-emergency operations and diagnostic tests at inflated prices to the NHS.
Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs), even on the best case reading of available information, deliver no more than 1 per cent of the total NHS caseload for elective treatment and diagnostics.
However, the new financial structure required to allow them to carve out a slice of the NHS budget is now destabilising NHS hospitals and services and the establishment of this new private sector is the hidden factor forcing the pace of "rationalisation" - with plans for the centralisation and closure of district hospital services.
Authors Stewart Player and Colin Leys use an impressive array of official documents and reports to show that, despite the huge levels of spending and the recruitment of a staggering 190 bureaucrats (182 of them from the private sector) to the Department of Health's new "commercial directorate," little or no information on these new centres has been published or subjected to any serious form of scrutiny.
Time and again, the authors show, ministers have refused to publish data to show the capacity of the ISTCs, refused to publish any financial data required to show whether the contracts they have negotiated represent value for money and failed to demonstrate that their performance matches the NHS or conforms with the targets that they have been set.
The Commons Health Committee, which should be the body holding ministers to account on such issues, has allowed itself to be kept in the dark and failed to ask the key questions which could tease out the logic of the government's policy and highlight the dangers and implications for the NHS and for patients.
Nobody ever asked Labour ministers to set up ISTCs. In some areas, strong campaigns have been waged against them. This book will provide vital ammunition for campaigners fighting on to Keep Our NHS Public.
JOHN LISTER