Daily Archives: 4 October 2013

Royal Mail being sold off ‘cheap’, says Umunna

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http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2013/10/royal-mail-being-sold-off-cheap-says-umunna/

The government’s plan to privatise the Royal Mail amounts to ‘flogging off a national institution on the cheap’ and could leave taxpayers shortchanged by future asset sales, Labour’s shadow business secretary has warned.

Image of post office van next to postbox

Chuka Umunna said the plan to float the company next week was being conducted in a rush, and called for a full valuation of the firm’s property portfolio should be undertaken to determine the value of any possible land sell offs.

He warned that postal delivery offices in prime development sites could be sold after privatisation, delivering a windfall for private shareholders but no return to the public sector. Steps needed to be taken so that proceeds from any sale could be retuned to taxpayers, he said.

Market analysts have predicted that the sale could value the firm at around £3bn. However, Umunna said two of the company’s London sites – in Nine Elms and Mount Pleasant – alone could be sold for more than £1.5bn.

The share prospectus for the sale of the firm stated these sites had been ‘surplus’, Umunna said and, once privatisation is complete, these and other offices other prime locations could be sold.

He called for ministers to reveal whether an independent valuation of the property portfolio has been undertaken ahead of the sale. They should also set out which of the firm’s sites across Britain have been identified as surplus, and whether any ‘clawback’ mechanisms have been established to allow proceeds to go to the Royal Mail’s pension fund or the Treasury.

It is expected Royal Mail will be listed on the London Stock Exchange on October 11 and will be fully traded the following October 15.

‘David Cameron’s fire sale of Royal Mail is bad for consumers and bad for businesses and there are real fears that taxpayers are going to be considerably short changed,’ Umunna added.
‘Royal Mail has a huge property portfolio in prime development sites in London and across Britain and there is nothing to stop the privatised company making a quick buck by flogging off these assets for development. Ministers need to come clean on which sites are due to be sold and what valuation has taken place.’continues

 

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Number of NHS A&E units failing to meet targets triples in a year

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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/04/nhs-a-and-e-units-targets

Thirty-nine departments failed to see 95% of patients within four hours in England, up from 14 units for same period in 2012

Accident and emergency
Accident and emergency

 

 

The number of A&E units failing to meet the government’s four-hour target has almost trebled in a year.

A total of 39 departments failed to meet the target of seeing 95% of patients within four hours between July and September, according to NHS England data. This compares with 14 units during the same period last year.

The target covers all A&E types, including minor injury units and walk-in centres, and the number discharged, admitted or transferred within four hours of arrival.

The NHS as a whole across England is still hitting the target, with 96% of all patients seen within the time between July and September. But this is only because some units perform way above the target, with some consistently hitting 100%.

In August, David Cameron announced £500m of extra funding over the next two years to support A&E.

The cash is intended to help units through the winter, cutting delays and reducing the number of admissions.

The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said: “David Cameron’s ill-judged re-organisation has placed the NHS in the danger zone. The government cannot continue to ignore the warnings. Until ministers face up to the fundamental causes – the collapse of social care and frontline job losses – the NHS will continue to struggle.

“This is further proof you can’t trust David Cameron with the NHS. We can’t have another year in the NHS like the last one – he needs to urgently get a grip.”

 

Continue ReadingNumber of NHS A&E units failing to meet targets triples in a year

NHS faces unexpected £500m cuts, say hospitals

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Hospital trusts say frontline services are threatened by cuts on top of anticipated £1bn fall in funding

NHS sign

The NHS faces unexpected cuts of £500m that threaten frontline services, according to a body that represents hospital trusts.

Despite the government’s pledge to protect frontline services with real-terms increases in funding, Monitor, the NHS watchdog, has proposed that in 2014-15 hospitals should be paid 4% less for operations than they were the previous year.

While hospitals were braced for a cut of about £1bn in funding, the Foundation Trust Network, which represents all 160 hospital trusts in England, calculates that Monitor is now asking for another £500m in savings – roughly £3m from each trust.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of the Foundation Trust Network, said cuts to frontline services would be deeper than expected and questioned whether the NHS could invest in much needed changes to the way hospital services work, recommended by the Francis report into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

He warned that hospitals were facing a “quadruple whammy” of “implementing the Francis report’s recommendations on quality such as improving staff-to-patient ratios, putting seven-day working in place, coping with increasing demand and investing in much needed change”.

“The level of efficiency savings the NHS has delivered over the last three years is unprecedented, but this level of performance cannot be sustained year on year till 2021. We need a reality check here – in the end you get what you pay for, and trusts can’t perform miracles out of thin air.”

Officials at Monitor were unrepentant, saying the forcing of hospitals to charge less for operations would free more money for clinical commissioning groups – clumps of GPs who purchase care on behalf of patients – to spend on the public.

However, Labour said it was another example of how the coalition’s reforms were silently squeezing the NHS.

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Government forcing us to open NHS to competition, say commissioners

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The government promised parliament that NHS competition would not be compulsory under their new laws. New evidence emerges today that these promises were false.

Local health bosses are saying they are legally obliged to put NHS services out to competition, despite repeated government promises to the contrary, it emerged today.

A survey in today’s Pulse magazine revealed that since April, Clinical Commissioning Groups have put 63% of contracts to provide NHS services out to tender, with a further 9% using the slightly different ‘Any Qualified Provider’ route. The contracts that have been opened up to private healthcare companies to take over include every aspect of NHS services and total billions of pounds.

And according to Pulse:

“When asked whether they had awarded contracts without putting it out to competition, many Clinical Commissioning Groups – including Cambridgeshire and Peterborough – answered: ‘This would be contrary to the section 75 regulations.’”

The revelation will re-open controversy about broken government promises on NHS privatisation.

The Section 75 regulations were made under the Health & Social Care Act in April this year. They appeared to force competition on the NHS in contravention of ministerial promises made during the stormy passage of the Act itself. At a critical juncture then health secretary Andrew Lansley wrote to the new local health bosses (Clinical Commissioning Groups) telling them that,

“I know many of you have read that you will be forced to fragment services, or put them out to tender. This is absolutely not the case. It is a fundamental principle of the Bill that you as commissioners, not the Secretary of State and not regulators – should decide when and how competition should be used to serve your patients interests.”

And he told the House of Commons,”There is absolutely nothing in the Bill that promotes or permits the transfer of NHS activities to the private sector”

Days later Tory health minister Earl Howe promised the Lords “Clinicians will be free to commission services in the way they consider best. We intend to make it clear that commissioners will have a full range of options and that they will be under no legal obligation to create new markets, particularly where competition would not be effective in driving high standards and value for patients. As I have already explained, this will be made absolutely clear through secondary legislation and supporting guidance as a result of the Bill.”

However when this secondary legislation emerged in February this year – the Section 75 regulations – it appeared to break these promises and give local health commissioners no choice but to put NHS services out to competition, as first highlighted on OurNHS openDemocracy and by Keep Our NHS Public.

A storm of protest errupted. Over 1000 health professionals wrote to the Telegraph urging for the regulations to be scrapped. Both the unions and the Royal Colleges – even those who had been muted in their opposition to the Act itself – and were up in arms at what the Association of Royal Colleges called ‘privatisation by stealth’. Over 300,000 38 Degrees members signed a petition for them to be dropped. Polly Toynbee called for the Lib Dems not to stand for any more lies on the NHS and many Lib Dem activists raised concerns.

Lib Dem health minister Norman Lamb told parliament “We are looking at this extremely seriously. Clear assurances were given in the other place during the passage of this legislation and it is important they are complied with in the regulations.”

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Privatisation will threaten Royal Mail’s six-day service, warns campaign group

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[Well of course the service will suffer, postage charges will rise, postmen and women will be sacked – that’s what businesses do to make money. Many Tory and Liberal-Democrat-Tory MPs reassure their constituencies that the opposite is true. They’re lying.

Tony Blair’s NEW Labour tried to privatise Royal Mail. Their argument was that there was a deficit in the pension fund. I never really grasped that very poor argument. Any deficit would have be due To Royal Mail or the government dipping into it as promoted by Gordon Brown. The current government argues that Royal Mail needs investment despite it apparently turning a profit. Why not invest some of that profit? ]

Competition will make it impossible for a privatised service not to cut deliveries in rural areas, says Save Our Royal Mail

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Richard Graham, the MP for Gloucester, argued that privatisation would provide the investment needed to compete against the private sector. “I don’t want to save Royal Mail because I don’t think it’s a panda or a tiger,” he said. “I want to grow Royal Mail. I want to see it become a world- beating company. It’s got 150,000 employees. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it had 200,000 and was running postal services under that great brand all around the Commonwealth?

“It needs to be able to compete against private-sector competitors, and it can only do that effectively if it has the investment it needs to get the technology that the competitors have,” he said.

The panel clashed over how privatisation would affect value for money for consumers. Dunn said Royal Mail had historically kept prices low across the market, but expected a sharp increase after privatisation that would allow its competitors to increase their prices, too. Graham, however, predicted that the new ownership would freeze prices after last year’s rises.

Ben Harris-Quinney, chair of the right-wing thinktank Bow Group, accused the government of “rushing out” the privatisation. “Research in July showed that almost half of the country were not aware of the privatisation of Royal Mail and 65% of those surveyed were against any notion of privatisation,” he said. “There has been no campaign. This has been a Westminster-bubble discussion that hasn’t engaged with the public at all.”

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Continue ReadingPrivatisation will threaten Royal Mail’s six-day service, warns campaign group