When the coalition government first introduced its landmark Health and Social Care Act in 2010, health secretary Andrew Lansley claimed the NHS would never again need to undergo such huge organisational change.
But even at the time, one widely respected commentator warned that – far from being the final fix that Lansley had advertised – the act “could become this government’s ‘poll tax’”.
In the event, it has been a slow-burn poll tax. Only now, ten years after it came into law, are we seeing its full effects, with publications from The Times to the Morning Star reporting that “A&E delays are ‘killing up to 500 people a week’”.
This figure – 5% above the normal number of people who die each week, though that baseline is also rising – can surely be traced back to the act, which ushered in a greater wave of privatisation than ever before. It compelled NHS management to behave as if they were in the private sector, competing to win business, and led to an increase in the proportion of contracts won and the use of contracts overall.
By 2019, life expectancy for women had fallen in almost a fifth of all neighbourhoods and in over a tenth for men. Poorer people, both old and young, in poorer areas suffered most, with infant mortality among babies born to the poorest parents rising. Later there was a rise in deaths of women who were pregnant.
In the four years after 2015, the value of one group of private sector contracts in the NHS rose by 89%. These figures were released just before the 2019 general election, partly in response to Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, claiming that “there is no privatisation of the NHS on my watch.”
In 2018, Lansley criticised Hunt’s cuts in screening services, blaming them for delaying the detection of his bowel cancer. Hunt, meanwhile, went on to become foreign secretary and then chancellor of the exchequer. His legacy, as openDemocracy’s Caroline Molloy wrote last year, is “one of missed targets, lengthening waits, crumbling hospitals, missed opportunities, false solutions, funding boosts that vanished under scrutiny, and blaming everyone but himself.”
Read the full article here:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/nhs-a-and-e-delays-austerity-emergency-care-hospitals-hunt-hancock-lansley/