GOVERNMENT efforts to play down the proportion of NHS contracts in England snapped up by the private sector are disingenuous and intended to mask its nefarious agenda.

But for British Medical Journal (BMJ) determination to use freedom of information legislation to expose reality, the public would still be in the dark.

The government is content to collude with the private sector and to hide behind the veil of corporate confidentiality to obscure the scale of its depletion of the public purse.

The Department of Health seeks to camouflage the scale of private-sector penetration of our national health service by insisting that private companies account for just 6 per cent of NHS expenditure.

However, the real scale of the danger emerges as the BMJ reveals that the private sector has won 41 per cent of contracts awarded via competitive tender against just 30 per cent for NHS providers.

This is because of the different priorities of private and public health bodies.

Public bodies care for sick people while private companies prioritise winning profitable contracts in the interests of their shareholders.

Clinical commissioning groups (CCG) imposed on the NHS by a radical top-down reorganisation, which both the Tories and Liberal Democrats had pledged not to introduce, are pressed to award contracts on a best value basis.

Not surprisingly, this works to the benefit of profits-first outfits prepared to cut right, left and centre to offer a lower quote.

Ministers point to CCGs as putting doctors in charge of placing contracts, but most of this work is outsourced to shadowy and secretive “commissioning support services” that are immune to the Freedom of Information Act.

The NHS is wholly funded by the taxpayer, so the public ought to be in a position to examine contracts to judge how their money is being spent.

However, this doesn’t suit the interests of the privateers and their parliamentary representatives.

We are constantly told that funding is tight and that all expenditure must be closely monitored, but that doesn’t apply to the rocketing employment of consultants by NHS England, more than doubling over the past four years to £640 million a year.

Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham is correct to conclude that the BMJ figures “blow apart Jeremy Hunt’s claim that ‘NHS privatisation isn’t happening.’ It is happening and it is happening on his watch.”

Burnham demanded a moratorium on new NHS private-sector contracts back in July in view of what he identified plainly as its “forced privatisation.”

He voiced concern then about a number of substantial and controversial contracts that were up for grabs and would last over five years, tying the hands of a new government for its entire term in office.

Just how single-minded the Tories and Liberal Democrats are in privatising our NHS was made evident last month when NHS England announced plans for a £1 billion contract to provide primary care support services that excluded bids from public-sector bodies.

Commercial front-runners to gobble up this bonanza included US military supplier Lockheed Martin and G4S, which is one of the small cabal of conglomerates favoured by government for public contracts despite, as the Commons public accounts committee reported on Tuesday, being under investigation for fraud.

NHS privatisation is developing at runaway speed.

Unless the conservative coalition is kicked out next May, the jewel in the crown of the post-war Labour government will no longer exist.