- Conference
- 2025 National Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 4 December 2024
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes that our NHS suffered fourteen years of a Tory government and its ideological austerity and valorisation of the for-profit sector. This has had a devastating impact on our NHS due to chronic and systematic underfunding putting services and staff under severe strain, a big drop in real terms pay for NHS staff, a huge exodus of valuable, experienced but burnt-out staff, crumbling NHS infrastructure, outdated equipment, a loss of much needed training bursaries, creeping privatisation, and more besides.
Any of us, at any time, could face devastating physical or mental health issues, so having access to high quality, properly funded and timely healthcare services is essential. It not only makes important humanitarian sense, but economic sense as a healthy population is less likely to need expensive crisis or chronic care and is a more productive workforce.
When the Labour Party came into power in July 2024, they quickly commissioned Lord Darzi to investigate the state of our NHS. Not surprisingly, his findings echoed what many NHS campaigners had already been saying; our NHS desperately needs more funding and changing the existing model would do more harm than good. Importantly, he also noted that the previous New Labour Government’s restorative funding for our NHS had had a very positive effect and had led to a health service that was rated as world class whilst the New Labour Party was in power.
At the time of writing this motion, it is not clear what the current Labour Party has planned for our NHS and it appears full plans for our NHS will not be announced until spring 2025. However, there have been some announcements in the autumn budget of NHS funding increases, which are very welcome and much needed. Despite this, there are still concerns. Health campaign organisations such as The Health Foundation, has said there are still substantial funding increases required for our NHS to properly recover.
There are also concerns around the use of the private sector. The current Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has said that the Labour Party plans to use the private sector ‘for as long as it takes’ to cut NHS backlogs. Additionally, a big NHS contract has recently been awarded to the private healthcare sector. E.g. In Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICS, a private company has taken over NHS services worth £1.3bn. This private company has been awarded a contract worth around £1.3bn to lead community health services for an entire integrated care system for up to nine years.
Although the Labour Party manifesto says: ‘With Labour, it [the NHS] will always be publicly owned and publicly funded,’ it doesn’t say anything about being publicly run. This is a huge concern in many ways, but one of the concerns is how much public money, staff, investment, contracts, will go to profit driven, non-unionised private healthcare companies when all this is needed in our NHS. Allowing more private sector into our NHS is a slippery slope as our NHS needs to move completely away from for Tory model with its outsourced (for profit) health services that use former NHS staff we need to attract back to our NHS and takes money we need investing back into our NHS.
Moreover, most of these private companies do not recognise trade unions, which is a big concern for Unison, so we need to bring healthcare staff back to our NHS and into our union where we can collectively fight for our NHS and the pay, terms and conditions we deserve.
This conference believes that to properly restore our NHS and ensure it succeeds into the future, our NHS needs continued full investment and proper funding. The use of the profit driven private sector in our NHS diverts much needed funding, staff and resources away from our NHS, which risks further undermining our health service. So, all outsourced services need to be brought back in house and any future contracts given to NHS run services. The continued or increased use of the private sector must also be resisted from a trade union perspective. Due to their often-seen hostility to trade unionism, they could undermine trade unionism and Unison’s collective power in the health service.
This conference calls on the HSGE to:
1. campaign, lobby, and make the case for a fully funded, publicly owned and publicly run NHS.
2. approach Unison’s Labour Link and encourage them to support this campaign.