Privatisation

The legacy of PFI in the NHS

South London Healthcare NHS Trust includes Queen Mary Hospital in Sidcup, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich and Princess Royal Hospital in Bromley. Its budget shortfall (£1 million a week) is the equivalent of employing 1,200 nurses or doing 200 hip operations a week. It is the first NHS organisation to go into the "unsustainable providers regime" — a system set up by New Labour but never used. Under that regime an administrator is brought in to run the Trust's board and to recommend measures directly to the Health Secretary about how to put the Trust on a more sustainable footing. The...

Fight the healthcare fat cats

According to Healthinvestor magazine, a trade journal for the parasitic profit makers in healthcare, private companies are complaining about how long it’s going to take for them to get their dirty hands on the profits from the great NHS giveaway. It is estimated that there is a £1.3 billion market in servicing Clinical Commissioning Groups. But it’s all taking too long to siphon off. There’s an air of nervousness amongst private sector. They fear they have been “cast as enemy number one” during the Health and Social Care Act “debacle”, says Healthinvestor. The new Health Alarm campaign has...

Commissioning: GPs must consider “public” option

Stroud Against the Cuts (SATC), through their “Keep Gloucestershire’s NHS Public” campaign, have scored a victory against NHS privatisation. Responding to protests and legal action, the Department of Health has told NHS Gloucestershire it can give a non-tendered contract to a local NHS body as one of the options when commissioning the county’s primary health services. Previously DH had ruled out this option. SATC immediately attended the first public meeting of the shadow GPs Clinical Commissioning Group, created by the Health and Social Care Act to take over the role of choosing which...

The class war at the top of British universities

There is a rift emerging not just within British universities, but between them. The National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts has released a report detailing the incredible expansion of executive pay in the last decade. High pay at the elite universities has spiralled out of control; a total of £382 million is being spent on the highest paid members of staff in just 19 universities, roughly double what it was a decade ago. These universities are spending nearly 2% more of their total income on high paid jobs than they were a decade ago, while cutting back on student support and now nearly £4 in...

My life at work: overheated, overworked, underpaid

Sam Carrow is a catering worker in a hospital in north west England. I work a minimum wage job for a chain coffee outlet in a big hospital. I’m employed on an agency contract, but there’s a mix of different employment types. Some workers, who used to work in the hospital’s own canteen, are directly employed by the NHS and have better pay, terms, and conditions. That creates tension. Agency staff are supposed to work a minimum of 20 hours a week but our contracts are “fully flexible”, which means we aren’t guaranteed to work that minimum. The atmosphere in the workplace is okay, and people tend...

What “Free Schools” mean

24 free schools have opened in the UK and many more are planned to open next September. Free Schools, after academies, are the second bow in the government’s plans to privatise education, under the guises of giving parents greater “choice”. Further expansion will have extremely damaging consequences for comprehensive state education. So far there has been less resistance to free schools then academies. This is partly because you cannot have a fight from within in a school that doesn’t exist. The free schools agenda offers a certain style of education aimed at niche audiences, with no public...

Serco, privatisation and Alex Salmond's SNP

The SNP government in Holyrood has announced the privatising of ferry services connecting the Orkney and Shetland islands with the mainland. The services are currently run by Northlink, a subsidiary of the state-owned David MacBrayne Ltd. From July onwards the services will be run by Serco. The contract, worth £243 million, will run for six years. Serco has experience of running just one other ferry crossing — the Woolwich Free Ferry across the River Thames. But it has a well-established record of bidding for all-and-sundry public sector contracts, both in Britain and abroad: railways, prisons...

Profiteers bleeding the NHS

Last Tuesday, private health giants Capita and United Healthcare introduced themselves to London’s leading GPs with Andrew Lansley as matchmaker. With the sinister language of a self-help book, the multinationals claimed the conference was “designed to ensure that Clinical Commissioning Groups are fully empowered, liberated and able to define their future.” In fact, this was a shallow marketing exercise designed to woo the new masters of NHS into handing over large amounts of public money. The effect of the Health and Social Care Act will be to “liberate” the private health firms to make huge...

East London school workers strike against cuts

Teachers and support staff at Central Foundation Girls School in East London will strike on Wednesday 25 April as part of a battle to resist redundancies and pay cuts. The school’s management announced a restructure in January 2012 that involves job losses and pay cuts of up to 10% for some support staff, and an increase in teachers’ workload. Current National Union of Teachers policy recommends an 80-20 balance between contact time and non-contact time, but CFGS management wants to reduce the time teachers have to do marking and admin work. The pay cuts for support staff will have a knock-on...

“Edubusiness” vultures circle

This week owners and administrators of private capital will assemble in London to share ideas about how state education can be further opened up to their insurgency. Education Investor magazine (yes, it does exist) is hosting a conference to bring together established edubusinesses such as Pearson (owners of the “awarding body” or exam board Edexcel), academy sponsors (including Balfour Beatty and ARK), and representatives of private equity companies, some of whom have given large amounts of money to Education Secretary Michael Gove in recent years. According to material published by the GMB...

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