Keep our NHS public!

NUS NEC notes

1. The advert recently placed accidentally by the British government in the Official Journal of the European Union, offering £64 billion worth of NHS services through control of Primary Care Trusts to private contractors.
2. That much of the increased NHS funding provided in recent years has been used to restructure the NHS along market lines, with millions going to management consultants and financial advisors and many tens of millions in Private Finance Initiative payments to shareholders and bankers. For instance, venture capitalists pocketed £81 million in profits from the £220 million PFI scheme to build Norfolk and Norwich hospital.
3. That UCL academic Alyson Pollock estimates that at least 15% of the NHS budget (£12 billion) is spent simply on trying to run the NHS as a market - on invoicing, accounting for and auditing millions of individual patient treatments, making and monitoring thousands of contracts, highly-paid management consultants and private sector “rescue teams” and marketing, advertising, lawyers and communications as hundreds of NHS trusts try to survive in the new market place.
4. That this process of privatisation is resulting in mounting cuts in services, as NHS trusts struggle desperately to balance their budgets.
5. That New Labour’s assault on the NHS is part of a broader agenda of privatisation and marketisation, also represented by top-up fees and - just one example - the recent decision to effectively abolish Incapacity Benefit.
6. The establishment of the Keep Our NHS Public campaign, and the growth of local campaigning initiatives against health service cuts including large demonstrations in Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Banbury and the Forest of Dean.

NUS NEC believes

1. That despite its rhetoric of support for the principles of NHS, the Labour government has continued the market-oriented reforms of the Thatcher and Major years, seeking to replace a comprehensive, integrated, needs-driven public healthcare system with a fragmented, market-driven system in which profit comes above the needs of patients and “the NHS…is destined to become no more than a logo attached to a group of corporate chains” (Alyson Pollock).
2. That it is vital that the student movement lends its weight to the opposition to the government’s attacks on the NHS and welfare state.

NUS NEC resolves

1. To oppose the government’s attacks on the NHS and welfare state, and campaign for an integrated, comprehensive public health system in which market mechanisms are abolished and good-quality universal healthcare is provided through taxation of the rich and business.
2. To affiliate to Keep Our NHS Public.
3. To continue to work with the Public Services Not Private Profit initiative chaired by Labour MP John McDonnell and supported by fourteen national trade unions.