Privatisation

After months of speculation and vague promises Labour's Clive Efford MP has published his NHS (Amended Duties and Powers) Private Members Bill. Was it worth waiting for? With the political limits of the Labour Party and the practical limits of what a Private Members Bill can achieve it was never going to repeal the 2012 Health and Social Care Act , nor reverse the cuts and privatisation of the NHS. But the Bill does tackle some of the worst bits of the Health and Social Care Act. Backed by the Labour leadership and supported by Unite, Unison and the GMB leaders, it’s an attempt to show Labour...

Tube cleaners employed by contractor ISS have returned to work, after a months-long lock out. Workers were locked out of work without pay for refusing to use biometric fingerprinting machines. ISS, which has a history of using immigration law against its mainly-migrant workforce, had openly admitted that the data collected would be shared with the UK Border Agency. The locked-out cleaners have been given a number of options, including returning to work on alternative contracts without biometric fingerprinting. Tubeworker called for a cleaners’ strike, voted for by ISS RMT members, to be called...

Two hundred GMB members employed by ISS at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, South London have voted for strikes to end two-tier conditions in NHS. The dispute is for the same pay rates, weekend enhancements and unsocial hours rates as the staff directly employed by the Trust. The GMB members are employed as cleaners, security, ward hostesses, caterers, on the switchboard and as porters. On 23 September GMB organised a protest outside the bondholders meeting of the PFI operator for the hospital. ISS workers, which includes cleaners, security, ward hostesses, caterers, switchboard operators...

Personal Independence Payment, the benefit launched last year to replace Disability Living Allowance, has already run into trouble. Like Universal Credit, the new benefit combining payments to working-age claimants currently made through Jobseekers’ Allowance, Income Support and Working Tax Credit, PIP is being piloted in Northern England before being extended to the rest of country. It is supposed to be in place by the end of next year although it now seems almost certain that the deadline will be missed. Despite its limited geographical introduction, there is already a large backlog of...

Michael Gove has surpassed himself in proving himself to be a callous disregarder of the needs of children. If we thought his attacks on the democratic accountability of community schools were not enough, his department has now proposed the privatisation of Child Protection services, including the power to remove children from their families. If these plans were to go ahead, the most vulnerable people in society would be reliant on services which are subject to the vagaries of the market. Professor Ray Jones of Kingston University states that G4S and Serco have been trying to get into these...

Social Finance and Social Impact Bonds are becoming a popular idea for public sector funding. Social Impact Bonds (SIBs sometimes called Payments for Success Bonds) began under the Labour government in 2010. Private investors lend the public sector money to meet certain social “benefits” or targets. Investing in social projects for profit is led in the UK by Social Finance UK. (Its sister organisation in the US is Social Finance US). One of its key projects is Social Impact Bonds, often using payment by results. With SIBs, Social Finance identifies an area where they believe they can help...

Probation officers and criminal solicitors struck at the end of March, in a dual protest against the outsourcing of 70% of the probation service and a huge cut to the budget for legal aid. Probation officers struck on 31 March, while solicitors struck for two days to 1 April. Solicitors and barristers previously struck on 6 January and 7 March, massively disrupting the function of courts across the UK. The £215 million cuts to the legal aid budget will restrict barristers’ pay, and make it harder for anyone other than the rich to access top-quality legal representation or bring cases against...

Royal Mail has announced plans to cut 1,600 jobs. The cuts, mainly of back-room and Head Office jobs, come in the wake of the privatisation of the service late last year. Unite and the CWU union, both of whom have many members working in the post, have said they are considering balloting for strike action. A spokesman from Unite claimed the job cuts had been calculated to make the service more attractive to the market. Almost four months ago, the CWU agreed a deal with management that would give Royal Mail workers a 9% pay increase and a range of guarantees against zero-hour contracts and...

An extract from Janine Booth’s book, Plundering London Underground: New Labour, private capital and public transport 1997-2010. London Underground must provide services to meet people’s needs, so its operation and development must be planned. The PPP showed, as private ownership had shown more than half a century earlier, that the “market” cannot meet London Underground’s needs. … Workers and passengers have a common interest in London Underground providing as good a public service as possible (I include in the scope of “passengers” those who wish to be passengers but are currently excluded —...

Probation officers in England and Wales will strike on 31 March and 1 April against the proposed privatisation of their service. Members of the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) also struck in November 2013, only the fourth strike in the union’s history. NAPO general secretary Ian Lawrence said: “The Coalition’s plans to sell off the management of offenders to private providers so that they can make a profit from the justice system is a recklessly dangerous social experiment that presents massive risks to the safety of communities.” Unions fear that privatisation will damage...