Renationalise the NHS, scrap integrated care systems, and end PFI contracts

We demand the Government restore England’s publicly funded, publicly provided NHS by reversing all privatising legislation, ending ongoing PFI contracts, and scrapping plans for Integrated Care Systems and for-profit US-style ‘managed care’.

The Government has no democratic mandate to privatise the NHS, yet vast amounts of public money are being squandered on the internal market, business managers, private providers, PFI debts, multinational accounting firms and corporate consultants. We believe the Health and Care Bill could undermine access to care and universal standards by locking in privatisation and dividing the English NHS into Integrated Care Systems. The Government should renationalise the NHS, and reverse all of the above reforms.

This government has no intention of privatising the NHS.

We firmly refute the claim that the Health and Care Bill undermines access to care or universal standards. It is not a privatising Bill. It delivers on the NHS’s own proposals for reform in its 2019 Long Term Plan and makes permanent some of the innovations we have seen in the system due to Covid. It captures learning from the response to the pandemic and the vaccine rollout. And it goes even further, improving access and standards with a range of measures to level-up health outcomes across the country, enabling people to live longer and healthier lives.

The Bill establishes Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to take on the commissioning functions of existing CCGs and some of NHS England’s commissioning functions. They will be directly accountable for NHS spend and performance, and will be NHS bodies. They will bring in representatives from a range of other NHS bodies including NHS commissioners and NHS providers. The work of ICBs will be driven by health outcomes, with no space for profit, competition, or private interests.

The new commissioning bodies being set up are all public bodies and will not, indeed cannot, be controlled by private providers. Independent providers, as corporate entities, will not be able to sit on Integrated Care Boards, nor will any individual appointed there be a representative of such an interest in any capacity.

The Bill includes ample safeguards to ensure that the interests of the public and the NHS are always put first. The ICB chair has the power to veto members of the board if they are unsuitable, and NHS England has the power to issue guidance to ICBs in relation to appointments as part of its general guidance-making power. That sits alongside the robust requirements on ICBs to manage conflicts of interests, including publishing and maintaining a register of Members’ interests, and NHSE’s wider duty to issue guidance to ICBs.