It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Ms Bardell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) on securing this important debate.
The NHS is undoubtedly the pride and joy of British society. Very few could argue against the claim that it is our nation’s greatest creation. That is why we should thank the thousands of NHS staff who put their lives on the line throughout the pandemic at every chance we have. It is also the reason why I support in full all 11 recommendations from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). Our NHS staff have for some time now been overworked, understaffed, under-appreciated and severely underpaid. Over the past 18 months, that has been exaggerated almost to breaking point.
From a dangerous shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment and general issues of overcrowding, it is clear that the NHS was bled dry long before the pandemic began. At a time when the nation relied on the NHS so heavily, we began to see the true effects of a gruelling combination of Conservative austerity and privatisation. After the sham of track and trace and all those private contracts through the pandemic,
I would have thought it was even clearer that privatisation of the NHS was wrong in any form and that a Government who care about the success of our NHS would halt any further attempts at privatisation, but it is strikingly obvious that it is not the case for this Government.
It is clear that this Government continue deliberately to mislead the public, because every time we discuss the issue, they make claims that the NHS is not being privatised in any way. However, during the pandemic, the Government allowed the sell-off by stealth of 49 GP surgeries to the US healthcare insurance giant, Centene. Twenty of those surgeries are in south London and they include three Streatham GPs: the Edith Cavell surgery, the Streatham High practice and the Streatham Place surgery.
Centene is a company that is bigger than Pepsi and Disney, and almost as big as Boeing. The UK arm of Centene, Operose Health, has stated openly that its market strategy is to exit NHS contracts that do not make a profit, revealing its worrying intent for our GPs. I fear the impact it will have on my constituents and others across the country who have had their local surgeries taken over by this profit-hungry health insurance giant, which has been taken to court for poorly treated patients in the US.
Our taxes should be going into the essential services that we all rely on for our health, not lining the pockets of wealthy shareholders and filling the coffers of profit-greedy American corporations. My concerns about the takeover and the threat it poses to our NHS are definitely not misplaced, because guess who No. 10 recently hired as a health adviser? None other than the outgoing chief executive of Operose Health. It is no wonder we are seeing disastrous legislation, such as the Health and Care Bill, coming from this Government. It is a harsh reminder that life and health are just products to be turned into sales for the Tories.
I am proud to have joined campaigners to raise awareness about these damaging changes on a local and national scale, and I echo their calls, as well as those made by other Members during the debate, that attempts to privatise our NHS must end with immediate effect. Furthermore, the Government must address a decade’s-worth of NHS mistreatment in the autumn spending review, so I would like to hear more from the Minister about exactly how the Government will do that.
The Government must commit to proper investment in the NHS and the 15% pay increase for our hard-working NHS staff, because that is exactly what they deserve. I end with NHS staff because they are what makes the NHS. Clapping and empty rhetoric are not enough. We need meaningful action from this Government if we are going to secure the future of our NHS as publicly owned and free at the point of use.
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