Following on from that, one point that we should take into account is the extent to which the private sector and the NHS rely on the same workforce. That is particularly the case in relation to consultants and less so for nurses.
While we can argue about the location, price or quality, perhaps, of treatment and aftercare, the key issue is diagnostics, which is a huge issue at the moment in the NHS. I have a slightly different take on that. For all of my life, my mum was deaf, and I have to say that the quality of NHS hearing aids was about 10 years behind the private sector’s—but people trusted them; they trusted the quality of the diagnostics and the advice that they were given. We have moved a long way in terms of diagnostics for eyecare and hearing aids, but it does not matter where that happens; what the general public want to do is to be able to trust the quality and independence of the diagnostics that they get. If we can do that, I rather suspect that the general public, in the wake of the pandemic, when they see the NHS struggling in all sorts of ways to make up for two years in which their staff have been pulled around, sometimes away from their specialties, would be quite forgiving—as long as there are some very basic agreements about how it will work and the integrity of the work and systems.