Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP
Secretary of State for Health
Richmond House
79 Whitehall
London
SW1A 2NS
20th November 2009
Dear Andy,
This Government has made major strides in improving the healthcare of our nation through record investment and a relentless focus on increasing standards of care. Recent moves which will formalise targets as entitlements are to be welcomed and will ensure that Britain never again takes on the mantle of the sick man of Europe. Your work on an NHS Constitution will similarly entrench the notion that citizens deserve to know what they can expect from their National Health Service and will form a bulwark against future forces which may work to downgrade levels of care.
One of the reasons why we believe that the NHS has improved to the extent it has is partly down to the Government’s non-dogmatic approach to the use of external expertise in the provision of its services. The presumption that the private and voluntary sectors should be considered on equal terms with state provided services has increased the capacity of the NHS to provide high quality services. Indeed, the commitment to using third sector providers was made in the 2005 Labour Manifesto: ‘In a range of services the voluntary and community sector has shown itself to be innovative, efficient and effective. Its potential for service delivery should be considered on equal terms.’
We are worried, therefore, about your announcement that henceforth the NHS is the “preferred provider” of NHS services. We understand the need to ensure that frontline staff are not taken for granted and feel valued for the tremendous work that they do, but there are more effective ways of reflecting this through pay, training and career progression opportunities. By restricting the use of the private and voluntary sectors solely to the provision of new services will limit your ability to use their huge innovatory potential in a constrained fiscal environment. Both sectors are ideally placed to help find more cost-effective and user-orientated solutions to provision as budget holders increasingly strive for efficiency savings.
As well as a missed opportunity, we are particularly concerned that this move will have a detrimental impact on the future stability of the voluntary sector. As you will know, the third sector is unique in having doubled its turnover and swelled its overall workforce by more than a third over the last 12 years. Much of this growth has been due to the sector bidding for and winning public sector contracts. Indeed £4.7bn worth of NHS services are delivered by the third sector. Many third sector organisations have factored continued public sector provision in their business plans for the future, but are now confused as to whether these opportunities will continue to exist under a future Labour Government.
One of New Labour’s strengths has been to recognise that excellence and talent is not confined to one sector or one institution, and that it is the duty of politicians to continually ask whether service provision could be improved in the interests of the user. NHS staff often hold the key to unlocking improvements at the frontline, but so do the thousands of workers in the voluntary sector who equally believe in the ethos of public service.
We would like to ask you to rethink your approach to the NHS as the preferred provider of services as we build up to the next election. Now is not the time to alienate important sectors that hold much good will and are potentially the key to the citizen-centred, high quality health services of the future.
Yours sincerely,
Jessica Asato, Acting Director, Progress
Peter Kyle, Deputy Chief Executive, ACEVO
Simon Blake, Chief Executive, Brook
Jeremy Swain, Chief Executive, Thames Reach
Professor Julian Le Grand, London School of Economics
Professor Paul Corrigan
Stephen Burke, Chief Executive, Counsel and Care
Allison Ogden-Newton, Chief Executive of Social Enterprise London
You can read coverage of this letter in the Guardian here.
As someone who has experienced care from the NHS and the private sector, there is no comparison in the Quality and standards of care and expertise provided and recieved by the NHS. The private sector doesn’t even come close. To allow private companies to take over provision of our NHS care would cause our healthcare system to fail. Andy Burnham, you made the right decision for the sake of all people in the UK who use the NHS. Thankyou.
funny old world – here is an avowedly left wing think tank advocating privatisation of the health service! And your arguments are wholly misplaced. Focussing on the voluntary sector in this way is a figleaf for the real social importance of what the government has been up to (and continues despite Burnham’s comment) – that public services should be contracted out to ‘private and voluntary agencies’ – note the conflation – there is no essential difference between private and voluntary in this paradym. Acting as arms length delivery vans for the state is not the proper role of voluntary agencies. What we want is good quality public services run by properly accountable public agencies, who are harried and hassled by advocates and campaigners from the independent sector to make sure that they do deliver what it says on the tin.
Andy Benson
http://www.independentaction.net
“We believe that the NHS has improved to the extent it has is partly down to the Government’s non-dogmatic approach to the use of external expertise in the provision of its services” How? The above writers have included no proof of this. It’s not enough to solely “believe” – it has to be proven. Just because private companies have been awarded X billion of contracts, that doesn’t equal improvement, nor does it prove anything other than a business model.