THE government’s NHS plan fails to address the root causes of the health service crisis. On this showing its decline and fragmentation are set to continue.
Of equal concern is the Labour response. To jeer that the Tories have “nicked” the party’s own proposals, as Wes Streeting does, simply underlines the reality that there is a cross-party consensus on lowering pay and deepening dependence on a parasitical private sector.
Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Steve Barclay recognise the huge staffing vacancies that have driven the NHS to the brink.
Yet their “transformational” workforce plan does not even mention the elephant in the room — the enormous real-terms decline in NHS pay over the past 15 years.
Low pay, burnout and poor morale are the drivers of the staff exodus from the NHS. And low pay feeds the other two: it sends a message to health workers that their efforts are not valued and starts the vicious cycle of departing staff that leaves shifts short and remaining workers burnt out.
Pay has been at the heart of the strikes rocking the NHS. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) estimates that nurses have lost a fifth of their pay in real terms since 2010; the British Medical Association puts the real-terms loss for junior doctors at 26 per cent.
Ministers boast about imposing a below-inflation pay rise on Agenda for Change NHS staff.
But two major health unions, the RCN and Unite, never accepted that offer. And the RCN’s recent strike ballot returned a huge majority for continued strikes, though it failed to meet the anti-union thresholds introduced under David Cameron.
Strikes continue in parts of the NHS, with the junior doctors still in dispute and consultants next to walk out. Sunak’s plan ignores their concerns and creates new ones — with doctors already expressing misgivings about the proposal to reduce the number of years young medics have to train.
And it changes nothing when it comes to the infestation of the NHS by private-sector providers, who both leech out vital funds and poach staff who can earn more being hired back to the NHS from outside, or the burden of debt still weighing down hospital trusts from PFI contracts.
The NHS is underfunded. We lag way behind comparable countries like France or Germany on per capita spending.
A properly funded NHS and a properly paid workforce — which means restorative pay deals to compensate for years of decline — are essential stepping stones to resolving this crisis. Without them, this “transformational” plan is a dead letter.
Water disgrace: Labour’s collusion with the privatisers
THE leaked email from £4-million-a-year Severn Trent boss Liv Garfield to other water execs indicates the rot at the top of the Labour Party.
It invites them to an “off-the-record roundtable” with Observer grandee Will Hutton to discuss how to assuage public fury at leaks and pollution while maintaining the lucrative racket that is privatised water.
The Labour leadership, she notes, have asked that these talks remain “highly confidential” — no doubt because colluding with the crooks covering our beaches in sewage while paying themselves seven-figure salaries is not a good look right now.
Especially since Keir Starmer himself won the leadership on a promise of “common ownership of mail, rail, energy and water.”
The criminal negligence of our water supply system is currently the biggest scandal in English politics — which is saying something. Yet Labour is in cahoots with those responsible.
