JUST a few short weeks before Parliament dissolved for the election, George Osborne announced that Greater Manchester’s £6 billion health budget was to be devolved.

It came as a surprise, not least because just a few weeks before, in a two-week consultation about the proposal to impose a mayor on Greater Manchester, the government had failed to mention the NHS at all.

It was a huge omission for such a fundamental transfer of power. Devolution can and should bring significant benefits to regions like mine.

Decisions should be made closer to people, with greater local accountability, putting people and communities in the driving seat about choices that affect their lives.

Pushing power down to local areas, communities and families gives us the chance to move away from a style of government based on “doing to” rather than “doing with” and draw on the talent we have in our region. However here lies the crux of the issue.

Osborne’s plan signals a fundamental shift in the way in which health services for hundreds of thousands of people across the Greater Manchester area are delivered, but at no point did he bother to ask the people of Greater Manchester what they want.

In the name of “empowering patients,” the people have been cut out of the conversation completely.

The time when people believed that Whitehall had all the answers is, thankfully, over. However, we can’t and shouldn’t replace one unaccountable structure in London with another one in Manchester. 

Across Greater Manchester people have voiced concern about the impact these proposals will have on the central tenet of the NHS — its national framework.

The Health and Social Care Act has already allowed for the back-door privatisation of the NHS.

It’s imperative that these proposals for the devolution of Greater Manchester’s NHS do not allow for the further break-up of the National Health Service.

As Andy Burnham said: “If you’re going to stick to the idea of a National Health Service, you can’t have a Swiss-cheese NHS where some bits of the system are operating to different rules or have different powers or freedoms.”

Given the Tories’ track record of hammering both the north of England and public services, people are also sceptical about the funding attached to the deal.

The Manchester Evening News revealed last year that many of Greater Manchester’s hospitals are running huge deficits, compounded by years of cuts to council budgets too.

We know that nationally the pressure on health and social care budgets is only going to grow.

The deal on the table from Osborne, so far, fails to answer serious questions about how and whether adequate funding will be provided.

It isn’t a case of Osborne’s solution or nothing. There is an alternative, as Burnham has set out — a properly funded and locally accountable NHS that hands greater power to people and guarantees the public ethos at the core of the NHS.

Labour leaders and MPs across Greater Manchester are united in the belief that the best deal for the people of Greater Manchester is genuinely accountable, adequately funded and rejects David Cameron’s top-down reorganisation of the NHS.

On that basis, with the involvement of the public, devolution could be transformative for this country and its people.

But for now, democracy has become an afterthought.

It’s time to put the people back into the picture. After all who’s best placed to know what will work best for Greater Manchester’s NHS — the people of Greater Manchester or a Tory minister in Whitehall?

Making sure Greater Manchester’s voice and needs are heard, not just what suits Osborne, matters to the whole country.

Instead of back-room deals about our public services, decided without us, behind closed doors, let’s build our public services with the best asset we have — the people.

• Lisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan.