LAST YEAR I was treated at the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax near my home town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire.

I was in for six days, recuperating after an operation. I didn’t feel unwell and I filled part of my enforced idleness talking to staff — cleaners, catering workers, porters, nurses — about their work.

The only directly employed NHS staff still working in Calderdale Royal — at least on the wards — were the nurses and doctors.

The other staff were employed a private “facilities management” company ISS, whose priority is profit.

I’d been wheeled into the ward by a porter whose tunic was emblazoned with the letters ISS. The catering staff and cleaners had the same on their overalls — ISS.

ISS is a multinational company with 400,000 employees and multimillion-pound profits, garnered from taxpayers’ funding of public service organisations such as the NHS.

Other companies were on the gravy train too. A faulty socket on the ward had to be repaired. Two electricians arrived in a truck which seemed to be carrying enough equipment to rewire every hospital in Yorkshire.

The electricians were from a huge contracting firm, Engie. Engie is a French multinational utility company, also deriving some of its multimillion-pound profits from our NHS.

I don’t know how much it cost the NHS to fix that socket — two electricians, the huge truck, coming from I don’t know where. I remember the time when hospitals had their own, directly employed electricians, joiners and other maintenance workers.

Another story I was told in Calderdale Royal was a shocker. A nurse told me that a while ago an extra electric socket had had to be installed in another ward. She said the contracting firm charged a four-figure sum to install the socket.

Whatever it cost didn’t go to the electricians of course. It mainly contributed to the profits of the privateer.

The tale may be apocryphal — I’ve no evidence — though the nurse who told it to me believed it.

I’d been told before of £80 call-out fees to change a light bulb. It came from a reliable source — a former administrator who resigned in disgust at the rip-offs.

Then there was basic stuff which I saw for myself. Between-meal snacks delivered to the ward by the catering staff were beautifully packaged sandwiches. I chose a tuna mayonnaise one.

The packaging informed me that the sandwich was made by Raynors, based at Chelmsford in Essex. Calderdale Royal is 200 miles away in Yorkshire.

It even told me that the sandwich’s journey in a van to the hospital had been tracked, its temperature monitored and, believe it or not, “tracked for driving style to ensure I [the sandwich] don’t get shaken up”!

ISS provided the mass-produced food which ISS staff served for main meals, shipped in from some mass production line elsewhere.

I talked to cleaning and catering workers about their wages. All new employees were paid a lower rate than those of existing staff — a systematic driving down of already-low wages to increase profits.

Nurses told me how desperately short-staffed they are. “We’d rather see more staff than get a pay rise,” one said.

She said the gaps are plugged with agency nurses, who are paid more and cost the hospital’s budget hugely. The agencies take their cut of the fee charged to the hospital for each nurse.

The agency nurses don’t know the wards and don’t know the patients. They may be on for just one or two shifts.

The details at ward level of the leeching of funds from the NHS to the private sector seemed endless. They are common knowledge to NHS workers exploited by the privateers.

Some patients too might recognise from personal experience that what they witness while in hospital is that we’re slowly losing our NHS to the private sector. They see the minutiae of how billions of pounds are flowing from our NHS to private firms’ profits.

Here’s one final example of the racket at Calderdale Royal and it’s a big one — and it’s a matter of record.

Calderdale Royal is a modern hospital which opened in 2001. Calderdale and Kirklees NHS Trust is forking out £773 million to repay the £64m it actually cost to build the hospital.

Most of the repayments are for interest charged on the original cost.

It was one of the country’s first private finance initiative hospitals — another of Tony Blair’s achievements.

Services to patients have been cut in Calderdale and Huddersfield-based Kirklees because so much of the trust’s taxpayer-funded income is spent repaying the debt.

In 2019 the trust recorded a deficit of £43m. So far, roughly 20 per cent of the NHS has been privatised, but the rate is accelerating.

But it’s not too late to stop it. The Calderdale Royal workers are the latest to join the fray.