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• Unite health bill briefing
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Unite health bill briefing

7 February 2011

Portcullis House, 3.30-4.30pm, Tuesday 8 February 2011

Unite the union will give a briefing for journalists on its evidence to the public bill committee on the NHS Health and Social Care bill tomorrow (Tuesday 8 February).

The public bill committee will be hearing evidence from Unite national officer for health Karen Reay and Unite health policy specialist Nick Parrott in the Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House at 5.50pm tomorrow.

However, beforehand Karen Reay and Nick Parrott will be giving a media briefing to political and health journalists on the key issues that make the Health and Social Care bill a very flawed piece of potential legislation.

The Unite briefing will be held in the Interview Room 1, Portcullis House from 3.30-4.30pm. As the room is very small, please email Unite communications officer, Shaun Noble on shaun.noble@unitetheunion.org, or ring 07768 693940, if you wish to attend.

The key questions that Unite will be urging MPs to pose as they deliberate the bill include:

• Will the bill regulate the use of private provision or accelerate private healthcare companies’ control over the NHS?
• Is taxpayers’ property being handed over to big business? What will happen to NHS assets under this bill? 
• Is the market being rigged by government to ensure NHS providers subsidise new private entrants to the market?  And if so, at a time of £20 billion in cuts to the NHS and with clinical jobs being cut, why is this considered a good use of taxpayers' money?
• How can Foundation Trusts be prevented from borrowing excessively using NHS assets as collateral?
• In whose interests are the new failure regime - the market or the patient?
• Why are the regulator’s powers concerning compulsory access to NHS facilities so vague?  Is this to ease the entry of private sector providers into the new free market?
• If this bill is a genuine attempt to inspire localism, then why are the ‘Health and Wellbeing Boards’ so light of powers and on local and staff representation?
• Is it the government’s intention to force NHS hospitals to share operating theatres and other clinical facilities with private providers, regardless of whether this causes NHS patients discomfort or prolonged suffering? How can the bill be altered to ensure that access to NHS facilities is purely on clinical grounds, so that medical factors always trump economic? 
• What will happen to NHS training and education?  In a fragmented health service, who will provide and manage standards of the professional training of a whole range of staff, from nursing to scientific, from clinical to pharmacy that are the backbone of the service?
• Will the new entrants to the health market be covered by the Freedom of Information Act - or as private bodies will they be allowed to sit outside the laws governing public bodies like the NHS?
• Given the clear public anxiety over the bonus and reward culture of the private sector, what restraints will be in place to stop "super salaries" creeping into the new health care market?  Who will police these - Monitor, which is an economic not a social regulator, or a hands-off health secretary? Can these be effectively policed when new companies will be answerable firstly to their shareholders, not their patients?

ENDS