Labour plans to treat 100,000 more NHS patients each year in private
hospitals, build more hospitals under the private finance initiative
and extend public-private partnerships to provide more choice for
patients in how and where they receive NHS treatment. Does this amount
to total privatisation of public health care?
Labour insists that it does not want to privatise the NHS; merely use
private hospital capacity in the UK and Europe (to ensure NHS patients
are treated more quickly), bring in private sector expertise (to run
treatment centres for high-volume routine operations such as cataract
removal) and use commercial money and expertise to build and maintain
new hospitals under the private finance initiative (PFI) or
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
For Labour, the important thing is not who provides the service to
patients (it could be the private, public, or voluntary sector) but
that the service is swifter and treatment is of equal or superior
quality to the NHS, represents value for money and is paid for, free
at the point of delivery, by the NHS, which is its principle duty.
As the health secretary at the time, Alan Milburn, said in July 2001:
"This is not privatisation - the taking of services out of the NHS. It
is bringing into the NHS private sector help in those areas where it
has a track record and where there are benefits for patients. The
private sector will help but the NHS is - and will remain - Britain's
dominant health care provider."
For years in opposition it was standard Labour rhetoric to claim the
Conservatives were "privatising" the NHS by contracting out support
services - such as cleaning - to the private sector, or proposing to
build hospitals under the private finance initiative.
Unlike the Tories, Labour used to believe that public services should
be provided as far as possible by the public sector as the guarantor
of standards, quality and good value. Now that Labour believes
partnerships with the private health sector are key to revitalising
the NHS, people are understandably a little confused.