Privatisation

Barnet residents resist privatisation

On Thursday 6 December around 50 Barnet residents took over a committee room in Hendon Town Hall for an hour, and ran an impromptu residents’ forum. The Tory Cabinet members were forced to adjourn to another room to do their work. We were protesting at their decision to grant a contract to outsourcing giant Capita to run a large chunk of services for 10-15 years, under the Council’s “One Barnet” privatisation programme. The contract, worth £320-750 million, will entail around 500 staff, currently delivering services such as revenues and benefits, transfering to Capita employment. Around 200...

Greece: stop the privatisation drive!

Greece’s government is trying to pass a law to bypass the need for parliament to approve each privatisation. The government is determined to proceed with the privatisation of all public utilities. It has already abolished the rule which obliges the state to maintain a minimum 51% share of the main public utilities. Yet all experience of the privatisations of public utilities and services shows that they harm both service users and workers. The only beneficiaries are the capitalists who make quick and safe profits out of human misery. Michael Sandel, the American professor who addressed Labour...

Lewisham Hospital: Paying for PFI

The South London Trust Special Administrator report takes some wading through but it turns up some scary facts. Lewisham Hospital is set to become a centre that deals only with some elective procedures, and minor injuries such as fractures. The Administrator says that if Lewisham Hospital provides planned non-complex surgery, such as joint replacements, and does not have to deal with emergency cases, uncertainty about the timing of surgery would be reduced. Planned surgery is sometimes delayed because of emergency cases. But even routine elective surgery can be unpredictable, and emergencies...

Industrial news in brief

Workers at the St Pancras Station outlet of chain sandwich shop Pret A Manger are facing intimidation and victimisation for organising a trade union in the store. A group of workers began organising in August 2012, around a series of ongoing grievances including non-payment, late notification of shift changes, bullying by managers, and being rostered fewer hours than their stated contracts. A petition around these demands was signed by nearly half of all staff working in the store. Almost straight away, key organisers found themselves victimised. One worker was given a disciplinary hearing for...

South Yorks NHS services prepared for sell-off

In South Yorkshire, the first series of health services are due to be handed out to private companies under the “Any Qualified Provider” (AQP) programme, which was extended under the government’s Health and Social Care Act. Under AQP providers of health services are approved for a particular treatment by Central Commissioning Groups and can then be chosen for treatment by a GP and patient. The government has obliged local health commissioners to use AQP for a set number of services and by this mechanism is forcing through privatisation. In South Yorkshire treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome...

ATOS outsourcing to NHS in Scotland

ATOS, the private company notorious for its treatment of sick and disabled people claiming Employment Support Allowance, is outsourcing one of its contracts for assessing entitlement to Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), the benefit replacing Disability Living Allowance. Lanarkshire NHS will receive £22 million of the £400 million ATOS is being paid for PIPs testing. As a civil servant in the Department for Work and Pensions and then a ESA claimant, I've seen the way ATOS treats sick and disabled people. The so-called medical assessments consist of ticking boxes on a computer screen and...

Labour: reverse NHS cuts!

According to the Royal College of Physicians, acute hospitals are on the point of collapse. Emergency admissions have increased 37% in the last decade, but hospitals have a third fewer beds than 25 years ago. For a while the decrease in beds was matched by a shortening of patients’ stays in hospital, but that trend is now in reverse. Older patients are coming into hospital with more complex conditions and are staying longer. Meanwhile the Tories plan £20 billion cuts by 2014-5, and £50 billion by 2019-20. The Tories’ Health and Social Care Act, passed despite wide protest in March, will make...

Stop these parasites!

News of potential job losses at Circle-run Hinchingbrooke Hospital has come as no surprise to campaigners who opposed a controversial franchise deal. Six months into the deal, which was seen by many as a testing ground for the future of the NHS, it is rumoured that 50 nursing and nursing assistant posts could go as part of efficiency savings. It is also believed that £500,000 has been cut from the cleaning budget with staff facing cuts and redundancies. When the management of Hinchingbrooke Healthcare Trust was taken over by Circle in February ministers declared it was a 'financial and...

Benefits workers face privatisation

On Monday 16 July, at 12pm, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Contact Centre Services released a previously embargoed statement, explaining that its Jobseeker's Allowance Online (JSAOL) service would be outsourced to Capita from the end of September 2012, just a few weeks away. The JSAOL service is currently one of several options open to people newly claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, though the Department recently stated it wants to increase online applications from 20% of all new claims (at present) to 80% over just a few months, incentivising people to apply in this way by...

Privatising homes will endanger children

We need to be very clear. The Tories don’t care that the most vulnerable children in society have been exploited and abused. They are not even that interested in saving money. BBC Newsnight’s coverage on 3 July was part of the propaganda to justify the continued attack on working-class people. We should remember the way that the media respond when children from wealthier backgrounds go missing. If looked-after children received comparable column inches, papers would be full of pictures of missing children on a daily basis. The tragic fact is that 2,036 separate “missing from care” episodes...

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