IN AROUND 80 local events across England today, as part of a day of action called by SOSNHS, campaigners will be demanding a massive £20 billion emergency funding boost for the NHS, to start off the long overdue process of repairing and rebuilding the services and performance that have been lost in over a decade of real-terms cuts since 2010.

SOSNHS has been backed by the main health unions, the TUC and other unions, Health Campaigns Together, Keep Our NHS Public and a host of other campaigning organisations, who have come together on a simple three-point programme – calling for extra funding, opposing privatisation and demanding pay justice for NHS staff.

Increased funding, to enable the NHS to reopen its own beds and expand capacity to bring down the massive 6-million-plus waiting list, is crucial to halting the growth of privatisation. 

Every penny of additional investment needs to be ploughed into the NHS itself, to ensure it can function again fully without recourse to private-sector “partnerships” and contractors.

And funding must be put in place for a significant pay increase for over one million staff, who are also crucial to restoring and improving services.

This week’s insulting government proposal for a miserly 3 per cent pay increase, barely half the going rate of inflation, amounts to yet another blatant cut in pay for NHS staff who have battled to keep services going through the nightmare of the Covid pandemic.

The demand for an extra £20 billion on top of last year’s inadequate spending review may seem extravagant: but it reflects the scale to which the NHS has been underfunded.

Every year since 2010 spending has lagged well below the previous average annual increase since the NHS was founded: this year the gap between actual spending and the amount it should have been topped £200 billion.

One impact of this underfunding has been the growing bill for backlog maintenance of hospital buildings and clapped out equipment, which has soared to £9bn, of which around £5bn is now urgent as this means thousands of incidents a year in which patient treatment is affected or even safety put at risk.

Another impact of the spending squeeze is that from mid-2010 to mid-2019 almost 8,000 front-line “general and acute” beds closed, along with 4,750 mental health beds. This meant a weakened NHS – already chronically dependent on private-sector mental health beds – went into the Covid pandemic. It was further weakened when thousands more beds were closed for social distancing.

Even now there are around 5,000 fewer acute beds in use than there were just before the pandemic struck, plus over 9,000 Covid patients in beds – but there is no plan and no funding available to get the lost beds reopened.

During the pandemic lack of NHS capacity became the biggest pretext for greater privatisation. In 2020 alone NHS spending on private hospitals and contractors rocketed upwards by almost 26 per cent, to over £12bn – with the biggest increase being the £2bn-plus deal to block book private hospital beds as the Covid pandemic took hold, while NHS beds remained closed.

That deal, which was supposed to make almost 8,000 private beds available for treatment of NHS patients, was a costly failure. But for private hospital chains it boosted profits, even though they treated 43 per cent fewer NHS patients than usual and most of the booked beds were unused. 

Despite this woeful failure, NHS England went on to sign a four-year £10 billion framework contract to continue using private beds until 2025. And on top of that, in January health secretary Sajid Javid instructed NHS England to sign yet another three-month “surge capacity” deal to put private-sector beds on “standby” for NHS patients in case the omicron variant got out of control.

It guarantees the private sector will receive at least £225m over three months to March 31 simply for “reserving” up to 5,600 beds, despite only agreeing to staff just half of them. And it allows the private hospitals to choose which cases to take on and to charge above the going NHS rate to treat any more complex cases.

NHS England CEO Amanda Pritchard reportedly told Javid the deal represented “a material risk that the NHS pays for activity that is not performed,” warning “this is significantly more expensive than the equivalent costs of an NHS site with much less certainty on the potential staffed capacity.”

If NHS capacity had not been cut back in over a decade of underfunding, it would not now find itself paying through the nose like this for use of private beds and unable to sustain safe emergency services.

It’s set to get worse. The new NHS “delivery plan” to reduce waiting lists now instructs local health bosses to develop long-term “partnerships” with the private sector that will effectively leave the NHS permanently dependent on private beds, which of course are not equally available in all parts of the country – so any scheme relying on them will widen inequalities in access to treatment.

Meanwhile private companies have also been profiting from NHS contracts for MRI and other imaging services, private laboratories and private partnerships for diagnostic and surgical hubs that the NHS cannot afford on its own.

The lack of NHS capacity to cope with both emergencies and elective care has lengthened waiting times and is driving ever more desperate patients to “self-pay” for private treatment – so the private sector gains either way from the NHS weakness.

The only way out of this hole that has been dug by Tory-led governments, and to restore the record levels of performance that were achieved before the austerity regime kicked in in 2010, is to begin to reverse the process – and invest now in fully reopening and expanding NHS capacity and recruiting, training and retaining more staff.

£20 billion is a relatively small amount compared with the tens of billions that have been lost, wasted, stolen or funnelled out to Tory donors and cronies during the pandemic: it could be raised quite easily from a wealth tax, getting tax dodging corporations to pay up, a Robin Hood transactions tax on the city of London – or many other ways to ensure the wealthy pay their share.

The Day of Action will need to be followed by events around the spring budget, on NHS pay and ongoing campaigning to build the biggest possible movement and pile pressure on Tory MPs and Rishi Sunak to force a U-turn. 

Find out more at sosnhs.org and sign the petition at https://www.change.org/p/sosnhs-emergency-funding-now

John Lister is editor of Health Campaigns Together.