Developing

YOUR FRIENDS' ACTIVITY

    Labour Conference: NHS Change Is Attacked

    Labour has called for the "reckless" sell-off of NHS services to be halted as it produced a dossier of contracts being signed off.

    Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, at the party conference in Manchester, accused the Government of embarking on "the single biggest act of privatisation ever seen in the NHS".

    The figures, obtained via freedom of information requests, revealed 396 contracts for community services, worth £250m in total, were being signed this week.

    More than a quarter (110), are being forced on health chiefs by new rules making them pick at least three from a sample of eight services to put out to tender, according to the data.

    Labour said the dossier, called Cameron's Great NHS Carve-Up, showed health bosses were having to tender for services they were already delivering satisfactorily.

    Children's wheelchair services, adult hearing, home-based diagnostic tests and podiatry are among those included in the first wave.

    The Opposition also claimed it had found evidence that at least one hospital group planned to double its private income by taking advantage of the new freedoms.

    Mr Burnham called for the planned extension of the shake-up to cover another 39 services to be halted until a review is done into the effects of the privatisation.

    "The sheer pace of this is proceeding in a reckless manner," he said. "It is a fast-track to fragmentation.

    "This is being really rammed through, particularly given all the other change that is destabilising the NHS at the moment, the financial pressure it is facing."

    Speaking ahead of his conference speech, he said he would restart the "NHS first" system where in-house providers have the chance to turn around failing services. 

    However, he conceded that he could not guarantee that any part of the service would be safe from outsourcing under his watch if it was failing.

    Mr Burnham told reporters he would retain a "core public NHS" but declined to identify what this would include or if certain services would always be publicly run.

    "I am pragmatic on this question rather than ideological. I don't think you can ever say if there's a failing service, even in the NHS, that you just put up with it because it's the NHS," he said.

    "If it is letting the public down you have got to open your mind to the fact that it needs to be changed and improved."

    Later, in his speech, Mr Burnham urged Labour activists to "make the next election a referendum on Cameron's NHS betrayal".

    He said he would "repeal Cameron's market and restore the legal basis of a national, democratically-accountable, collaborative health service".

    And he secured a big roar from the hall with a dig at new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. "It's hard to be a shadow when you're up against the Invisible Man," he joked.

    "A month in the job but not a word about thousands of nursing jobs lost. Not one word about crude rationing, older people left without essential treatment. Not a word about moves in the South West to break national pay."