In light of Labour’s failure to address in any serious way the issue of NHS funding in its manifesto, the new plan to hand already limited NHS resources to private care homes is puzzling. After 15 years of government cuts to local authority budgets, social care is dominated by private-equity-owned companies, extracting billions in profits from the social care system. Handing NHS cash to them makes little economic sense and worsens an already big problem.
Research by the public ownership campaign group We Own It analysed more than 72,000 NHS outsourcing contracts worth more than £130bn and using company profit margins estimated that private firms made £6.7bn, or £10m a week, from NHS contracts since 2012. We Own It activists delivered this research to Wes Streeting’s constituency office on 17 June.
For many politicians, privatisation is a neutral choice. It doesn’t matter, for them, who provides a service as long as they do a good job. But the reality is that privatisation ends up depriving the NHS of much needed funds.
Labour doesn’t want to make big funding promises. This should make the party more concerned than it currently seems to be with making sure NHS money isn’t siphoned off on profits.
Johnbosco Nwogbo
Lead campaigner, We Own It
• It’s good to see ideas from any of the political parties about how to reduce the pressure on hospital beds and A&E departments. But the Nuffield Trust website states that there has been a decline in care home beds from 11.3 to 9.3 per 100 people aged over 75, in the period 2012 to 2023. The trust also confirms that recent data on delayed discharges from hospitals suggest that a large number of people are waiting for a permanent place in a care home – as might be expected.
Changing the ownership or allocation rights of some care home beds from the care home owner or manager to the NHS will not increase the total stock. It might speed up the pace of hospital discharges, but would that be to the detriment of people struggling to cope in their own homes and needing a care home admission?
Problems in the social care sector need addressing just as much as those in the NHS – the two sectors are closely linked and interdependent, and need to be seen as one integrated health and social care system.
John Harvey
Hayfield, Derbyshire
• Oh great – more sticking plaster! What about all the people who are not hospital patients but are waiting for places in care homes? We need a root-and-branch review of the whole care system, not a bit more tinkering on the margins. If not now, on the brink of a Labour government with a solid working majority, then when?
Rodney Smith
Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire
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