4 Jul 2025
As recently as May 2023, Labour MPs including Ellie Reeves and Anneliese Dodds were sending what appeared to be template email response to our supporters:
"We must build capacity in the NHS...There is, in my view, an incompatibility between the aims of private companies and the aims of the NHS. A company’s primary concern is its shareholders, not the patients."
The idea of “making the NHS so good there’s no need to go private” appeared in these emails, and it’s also been a message coming from the top of government.
What happened to making the NHS so good there’s no need to go private?
The 1 year old Labour government’s ‘10 Year Health Plan for England’ should have been a huge opportunity to set out the best way to achieve this.
It would have required serious investment in NHS capacity, alongside a gradual plan to phase out reliance on the private sector. A 10 year time horizon would be sensible for such a project.
Instead Health Secretary Wes Streeting talked about Attlee’s government and how “healthcare is not a privilege to be bought and sold”. But he has launched a plan that fails to address the key problems of privatisation and lack of investment.
This is not the way to build back better.
Here are five key problems with the government’s 10 year plan:
1) The government wants to introduce new private finance into the NHS
The plan describes new Neighbourhood Health Centres as a ‘one stop shop’ for healthcare, and a place where multidisciplinary teams can be based.
They intend to fund these centres by using Public-Private Partnership (PPP): agreements which would invite the private sector to build the centres, before extracting taxpayers’ money as profit once they are up and running.
The plan itself admits that previous Public-Finance Initiatives (PFI, a form of PPP) were a ‘costly mistake’. PFI has led to the NHS paying up to 27 x over for hospitals. And there’s no clear explanation of how this time would be any different.
The government will be making a decision about PFI in Neighbourhood Health Centres at the Autumn budget. Sign the petition to tell Streeting that PFI is not welcome in our NHS.
2) The waste of privatisation will continue - no mention of insourcing
In fact, the opposite. The report repeatedly mentions ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ with the private sector. This directly contradicts the pre-election promise Starmer made to deliver ‘the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation’.
Insourcing has the potential to deliver huge benefits to our public services by ensuring that our money isn’t wasted on shareholder profits. Our analysis from over 70,000 NHS outsourcing contracts between 2012 and 2024 revealed that private firms were making £10 million a week (that’s £6.7 billion total) from NHS contracts. This is money that could have gone back into the NHS, to make it better.
78% of these private profits are made on contracts that could easily be insourced back into the NHS, for services like surgeries, tests, catering and cleaning. Insourcing contracts like these would release £443 million annually - enough to build 62 new NHS operating theatres, or pay for just over 1 million patients to get to A&E.
An Oxford University study found that outsourcing actually kills - it's been linked to 557 extra patient deaths. And a recent study shows that outsourced healthcare in the NHS has resulted in a two-tier system benefiting the wealthy, and increased waiting times for all patients.
3) The government is using technology to sneak privatisation into the NHS
Technology is a massive focus of the 10-year plan, which promises to provide patients with an NHS app which will serve as ‘a doctor in their pocket’.
Not only could this threaten the personal, face-to-face care which is fundamental to our NHS, but the app - which intends to serve as ‘a full front door to the NHS’ - will be letting private companies in through the backdoor.
The app is set to sell private companies’ digital wares through its ‘HealthStore’. The suggestion that patients will be able to choose their ‘preferred provider’ through the app also leaves the door wide open to the integration of private healthcare into our NHS.
And let’s not forget the value that our data holds for big business, even while they fail our NHS - as in the government's £330 million pound data deal with Palantir.
4) Car park and corridor care is barely mentioned
Moving medical care from hospitals to communities might sound appealing. But the government’s vague intention to ‘expand access to urgent and emergency care services at home and in the community’ fails to acknowledge the very real and very current crisis we are facing in accessing urgent medical support.
A recent Unison survey outlined the grim reality of ‘car park care’. Patients are deteriorating and dying as they wait - often upwards of 12 hours - for hospital beds to become free. In Wales, ambulance delays have increased fourfold in the last seven years.
People are needlessly dying as they wait for help to arrive. Instead of handing out NHS funding to profiteers, the government needs to invest our money in urgent healthcare which saves lives.
5) No plan to match the funding levels of other European countries
Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS was clear that “austerity in funding and capital starvation” was one of the key factors leading to the “dire state” of the NHS.
Yet the word “austerity” isn’t even mentioned in the government’s 10 year plan, which was supposed to be based on Darzi’s evidence.
The plan offers a narrative of reform instead of investment, insisting that sustained public spending on the NHS has failed.
But that isn’t true. By matching NHS investment to EU averages, Blair’s government delivered the longest sustained improvement in NHS history. In 2014, the NHS was ranked the best healthcare system in the world. Long-term investment in public services works.
But by inviting in profit-making companies and replacing people with apps, the government has chosen to prioritise the interests of big tech and corporate lobbyists over our health.
This is unacceptable and a betrayal of the NHS that Attlee and Bevan created.
Only the NHS can fix the current crisis. Only the NHS
- Takes care of patients at A&E — the private sector doesn’t have A&E
- Trains our doctors and nurses — the private sector relies on NHS-trained staff
- Looks after all patients — the private sector cherry picks
It deserves our support.
Sign the petition to tell Streeting that we deserve an NHS which puts patients - not profit - first.
