I will be as brief as I can, Madam Deputy Speaker, to accommodate Members with clear constituency interests who I know will want to contribute to the debate. It was interesting to watch the Secretary of State being the pantomime villain of the day, and trolling us about the Conservatives’ record on the national health service.
I want to make some observations about privatisation and outsourcing in particular. I think that I should start off with the World Health Organisation’s definition of privatisation:
“a process in which non-government actors become increasingly involved in the financing and provision of health care, and/or a process in which market forces are introduced in the public sector”.
Patients who attend health service centres throughout these islands will receive amazing care, but that is predominantly due to the dedication of the people who work in the NHS, some of whom—as we need to recognise—are working under much greater pressures than others.
Some have argued that outsourcing such services as cleaning or car parking is a good thing, but there is evidence that the outsourcing of cleaning, and poor-quality cleaning, led to the rise of hospital-acquired infections. The Conservatives created the internal market in 1990, and that led to an “us and them” mentality in many local areas because it introduced competition between hospitals. In 2010, they promised “no top-down reorganisation”, but then introduced the Health and Social Care Act 2012, section 75 of which pushed commissioning groups into putting contracts out to tender.
We have seen the rise of the independent treatment sector, which won approximately 34% of contracts in 2015-16. That figure rose to 43% in 2016-17, and it now stands at approximately 60%. It cannot be denied that private companies are more involved in healthcare in England.