Labour hands £2.2bn in NHS contracts to corporate health in just two months

NHS no-profit bid rejected and a contract handed to firm despite massive security breach as Starmer and Streeting NHS give-away through US-style so-called ‘integrated care’ ramps up

The Labour-run NHS has handed massive contracts worth around £2.2 billion to private companies in just a couple of months – one of which involved rejecting a non-profit bid from local NHS facilities and the other awarded despite a massive data breach involving the recipient of the contract award.

In September, a £900m contract for pathology services across a large part of Essex was handed to German company Synlab by Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSEFT) even though, just in June this year, Synlab’s ‘Synnovis’ joint venture with Guy’s and St Thomas and King’s College Hospital was hit by a ransomware attack carried out by an organisation known as Qilin.

As well as to Guy’s and King’s, the joint venture’s 15-year contract for pathology services to most of south-east and central London, including both hospitals and GP surgeries – separate from the new Essex contract – is worth around £2.25bn. The ransomware attack, the most serious such NHS breach to date in its impact, caused major disruption to pathology systems.

And in mid-October, Streeting’s NHS awarded a contract for around £1.3bn to HCRG Care Group, the rebranded Virgin Care, through Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board, for expanded ‘community care’ services – part of Streeting’s plan to push care away from hospitals as part of the cost-cutting and, ultimately, hospital closures intrinsic to ‘integrated care’ and Streeting’s so-called ‘ten-year plan’, which rewards providers for not providing treatment, by giving them a share of the ‘savings’.

Streeting has said he plans to go even further than the Tories in handing out NHS contracts to private firms, even though it is self-evident that publicly-owned providers are more sustainable because they do not take profits that move funds away from actual healthcare and the essential systems to support it.

Despite Starmer campaigning for the Labour party leadership on a promise to renationalise the NHS, he, Streeting and other Labour front-benchers have accepted massive donations from private health interests and quickly dumped the pledge once he had the party leadership. As well as the privatisation push, they are also expanding the use of ‘physician associates’, who cost less and have far less training, instead of fully-trained doctors, even though even the government’s own analysis considers this dangerous to patients. Streeting has also flagged future refusal of treatment to patients whose lifestyles the government considers to have contributed to their illness and has said that his plans for the NHS include patients treating themselves.

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