I fully support what my hon. Friend says. The boards will be remote and centralised and will seriously restrict the power of local authorities to protect local services. With these changes, private healthcare giants will not only have a bigger say over the NHS but will be granted contracts with even less scrutiny than now.
By opening the door to private healthcare providers to take decisions on NHS budgets and services, the Bill makes it easier for public health contracts to be distributed to private providers, with less transparency and accountability. Safeguards in the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 will be excluded, watering down protections for employment and environmental provisions in procurement processes. There is no doubt that the Bill will put on steroids the cronyism we have seen during the pandemic while our NHS heroes have worked day and night, putting their lives on the line. The Government have cut real pay for nurses while handing out billions of pounds of contracts through an illegal VIP system to their mates and donors and to the failed track and trace system.
The NHS is the jewel in the crown of our public services—our proudest achievement. However, 12 years of Tory austerity, and now the pressures of the pandemic, have stripped it to the bone. An unbelievable £100 billion has gone to private healthcare providers in the last decade alone. The last thing the NHS needs right now is
a dangerous overhaul that puts the private sector at its heart. We must take this and every opportunity to support amendments to the Bill that establish the NHS as the default option for all NHS contracts, to mitigate the worst parts of it. We must stand up to these new attacks or risk losing the NHS to privatisation by stealth. We must go further in our demands to roll back the damage done, reinstating the NHS as a truly national service and establishing a fully integrated national care service with staff and patients at its heart.
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