“It’s crunch time for the NHS in England,” UNISON’s Eleanor Smith told the Labour conference in Manchester today.
“The service stands on a financial cliff edge,” warned Ms Smith, an NHS theatre nurse. “Yet this government chose to waste £3bn on a massive, top-down reorganisation that no one voted for and no one wanted.”
And the result of that is millions being wasted on “expensive and often botched” procurement exercises, as billions of pounds of contracts are put up for grabs, in a move “nakedly driven by ideology, not what is best for the public purse and certainly not what is best for patients.”
But everyone can show their opposition by writing to their MPs and calling on them to back Clive Efford’s private member’s bill to repeal the Health and Social Care Act, said Ms Smith.
Speaking on the day that UNISON announced industrial action by health workers in England, Ms Smith told delegates that she and her colleagues are “confronted by a government determined to restrict thousands to poverty pay.”
And she added: “No-one is falling for the government’s claim that decent pay costs too much – because this is not a decision borne of necessity: as with the Health and Social Care Act, this is yet another ideological choice.”
Closing her speech, Ms Smith told the conference: “We can still save our NHS. But the time to act is now.”
