Campaigners march against deaths due to NHS privatisation

Our NHS is in crisis. More than 7 million people are waiting for treatment, ambulance waiting times are through the roof, and thousands of doctors and nurses are striking. Excluding the pandemic years, the number of excess deaths in the UK is at its highest level since 1951. This crisis isn’t just the product of short-term pressures in the wake of the pandemic. It’s also due to long term trends such as persistent underfunding and, crucially, excessive private involvement in the NHS, which has hollowed out our health service.

 This weekend, We Own It organised an action to highlight the disastrous effects of privatisation on our NHS. The action was inspired by a recent University of Oxford study which estimated that outsourcing (the provision of NHS services by private providers) led to 557 avoidable deaths between 2014 and 2020. 

557 campaigners assembled on Parliament Square, each representing an avoidable death. Every demonstrator held a single white rose. After speeches from UNISON’s Vice-President Amerit Rait and the study’s author, Ben Goodair, we marched to the Department of Health and Social Care to hand deliver 557 letters to the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, warning the Health Secretary of the dangers of privatisation.

 Public healthcare is fair. Public healthcare works. Privatisation kills.

 The Oxford study was published in the Lancet Public Health Journal in 2022. It says that “Private-sector outsourcing corresponded with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality.” The analysis shows that an annual increase in outsource spending of 1% is associated with a rise in treatable mortality of 0.38% – or 0.29 deaths per 100,000 people – the following year. The study claimed 557 additional deaths between 2014 and 2020 can be attributed to the rise in outsourcing. The authors suggest that this is because private providers are ‘‘delivering worse quality care”.

Private providers deliver worse outcomes at a higher cost to the NHS, making large profits at our expense that are then exported to distant shareholders. This is bad for patients and weakens the NHS, which must spend more for less and is unable to build up its own capacity. And it’s getting worse. The British Medical Association writes that “the UK Government’s plans – and namely its recently published elective recovery plan – risk embedding a longer-term trend of outsourcing NHS contracts and funding to ISPs (independent sector providers) in England, rather than sustainably increase NHS capacity.”

 Outsourcing is one way that private companies undermine our health service, but it isn’t the only way. Private companies also undermine our NHS by competing with it, drawing money and people away from our health service. They piggyback on the expertise of NHS doctors trained at public expense, poaching medical professionals from the public sector. 

As the NHS comes under even more pressure, more and more health workers are leaving the NHS, often to join private providers. And more and more people are using private providers. We’re on the path to a two-tier health system in which some people rely on an overstretched NHS and those wealthy enough to pay have access to high-quality private care. In other words, we are moving further towards the American model. The US company Centene is already the largest single provider of GP services in England. 

David Rowland, the Director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, writes that “the growth of a two-tier system has not happened overnight…Nor is a two-tier system inevitable due to market forces. It is in fact the product of government policy over the past two decades and any government can, if they choose, reverse this trend”. We call on the government to reverse this trend by adopting policies that strengthen the NHS against for-profit providers. The NHS is for all of us.

Our action on Saturday was supported by a broad coalition of organisations, including Unite, Unison, and Keep Our NHS Public. John Puntis, co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public said, “The event on 25th of February emphasises the human cost of outsourcing services with hundreds of preventable deaths. The public should be angry about this, just as with the 500 deaths a week attributed to delays in Emergency Departments. These appalling statistics highlight that government policy decisions to underfund the NHS, cut costs and ignore understaffing have serious and damaging consequences for us all. Ministers must be held to account.”

Our mission also has the support of Stephen Fry. He says the NHS is “one of the proudest things Britain has ever done” and lamented that “it’s now under threat from cynical, greedy, destructive people who mustn’t be allowed to get away with this.” And he reminds us: “We own it. It's ours. The NHS belongs to us. Our grandparents, great grandparents, parents, and we ourselves made it what it is. We contributed to it. We paid for it.”

Who could disagree?