LOCAL authorities have started contracting “shitester” private sexual health service providers as they can no longer pay NHS rates, an expert has told a TUC fringe meeting.

Public health doctor Professor Allyson Pollock blamed 30 per cent cuts to councils’ public health grants since 2015.

She said councils have until recently largely been commissioning former NHS services for public health after these were carved out of the health service and given to local authorities under the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Ms Pollock told Tuesday’s fringe meeting: “Until now they’ve largely been commissioning back contracts, very expensive, and they’ve been contracting these services back to the NHS.

“I work in Newcastle upon Tyne and the hospital trust there decided it wouldn’t bid for those services because the price was too low and the reason it was low is because the grant for these services for public health has been cut by 30 per cent, since around 2015, so what does the local authority do?

“It contracts out its services to a number of sort of shitester type companies.”

She clarified she was using the slur against Succeed for Health and Prevent X — “very small companies that are operating in Doncaster and Hereford.”

Ms Pollock added the leader of a Labour council, whom she did not name, had wrote to her about former NHS contracts being handed to them, saying: “For the sake of clarity the sexual health service is not a NHS service but is a service procured by the public health team.”

She said: “Until 2012, it was for nearly 70 years and more an NHS service.

“Basically they made this decision through the health and well-being board which agreed to it, so now you must lobby the health and well-being boards to see what’s going on, which agreed to the privatisation of the service.”

She also warned government was failing to keep track of NHS contracts due to it “being broken up.”

Ms Pollock said: “This dismantling and privatisation is happening at speed. Hundreds of billions of pounds of contracts. It’s very difficult to keep track of it.

“We must have much more central oversight of what’s happening and put real pressure on the government to make sure we have all those contracts in one place and we can begin to monitor them  and understand them.

“The idea of any contract monitoring taking place is absolutely ludicrous.”