Royal College of Nursing (RCN) chief executive Pat Cullen (second right front row) joins members of the RCN on the picket line outside the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield, as nurses take industrial action over pay, January 18, 2023
TEACHER and NHS worker unions threatened strike action today over government-backed below-inflation public-sector pay rises.
The Department of Health and Social Care, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education have recommended 2.8 per cent unfunded rises for 2025-26 to pay review bodies after Chancellor Rachel Reeves ordered all departments to cut costs by 5 per cent.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “There are real concerns across the trade union movement about the government’s recommendation.
“The government must now engage unions and the millions of public-sector workers we represent in a serious conversation about public service reform and delivery.
“It’s hard to see how you address the crisis in our services without meaningful pay rises.
“And it’s hard to see how services cut to the bone by 14 years of Tory government will find significant cash savings.
“In the longer term, we need a spending review that gives hope to those delivering and relying on our public services.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting arrives in Downing Street, London, for a Cabinet meeting, December 3, 2024
HEALTH Secretary Wes Streeting has been urged to honour the New Deal for Working People after failing to back a Unison NHS strike over a £100 million-plus privatisation plan.
More than 350 facilities workers are on a three-week walkout over East Suffolk and North Essex Foundation Trust (ESNEFT’s) plans to outsource their jobs.
Large NHS contracts such as this need Cabinet Office approval but Mr Streeting has said he will not intervene in the trust’s outsourcing bid despite Labour’s promise for the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation, a union source said.
His stance has attracted criticism from Labour MPs, Unison and NHS campaigners, with ESNEFT’s board of directors expected to rubber-stamp the outsourcing of their soft facilities management contract tomorrow.
Eastern Unison head of health Caroline Hennessy said: “Moving these essential teams out of the NHS is a false economy and goes against government pledges on insourcing.
“The trust has spent months trying to justify its ill-thought-out plans to privatise the jobs of these key staff and has failed to win any of the arguments.”
Keir Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has promised an extra £22bn to help cut NHS waiting times, at University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire on 31 October. Photograph: Darren Staples/AP
NHS bosses are said to be privately concerned about Keir Starmer’s ambitious targets to cut waiting lists for routine operations, set to be announced later this week, which will also include specific targets on living standards and housebuilding.
The prime minister is expected on Thursday to set a target for 92% of routine operations and appointments in England to be carried out within 18 weeks by March 2029 – a goal that has not been achieved in almost a decade – the Times has reported.
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Most NHS trust bosses doubt the health service can restore key waiting times by 2029. A recent survey by the hospitals body NHS Providers found that 71% of the leaders overall, and 100% of those who run acute and ambulance trusts, thought it unlikely that they could make such progress that quickly.
The Society for Acute Medicine (SAM), which represents hospital doctors, said Starmer’s desire for a return to 92% of patients waiting a maximum of 18 weeks, four months before the end of this parliament, was “doomed” unless overstretched NHS urgent and emergency care services, such as A&E and ambulance services, were dramatically improved.
A plan to provide ‘golden hellos’ to new dentists in specific regions has been found to have failed. Photograph: Andrew Fosker/Alamy
National Audit Office finds ‘significant uncertainty’ as to whether pledge for extra 1.5m treatments will be fulfilled
Plans to end the deepening crisis in access to NHS dental care are failing, leaving patients unable to get treatment, according to a warning from the government’s spending watchdog.
The National Audit Office’s (NAO) damning verdict on the “dental recovery plan” prompted patient groups to voice alarm that people’s struggles with decayed teeth represents “a serious public health concern”.
A pledge to provide an extra 1.5m treatments in England this year is in disarray amid falls in both the number of dentists doing NHS work and people receiving help from them.
There is “significant uncertainty” as to whether that ambition will be fulfilled because two key elements of the plan have not been achieved, an NAO investigation found. None of the promised new fleet of mobile dental vans has appeared and £20,000 “golden hellos”, to entice 240 dentists to work in areas of acute shortage, have only produced one extra dentist.
Health workers and activists ramp up their campaign to oppose surveillance company Palantir’s role in managing NHS data
Health workers and activists in Britain are intensifying their campaign against US-based surveillance and data company Palantir, as Keir Starmer’s government accelerates its push to involve the notorious firm in managing National Health Service (NHS) data.
Palantir first gained a foothold in the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic, securing contracts outside standard procurement processes and enjoying popularity among high-ranking health officials. The company, infamous for its involvement in operations such as the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and migrant persecution under the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), soon expanded its role in Britain. By last year, it had won a £330 million (USD 417 million) contract to implement the Federated Data Platform (FDP), intended to modernize medical data management across England.
Not all NHS institutions are currently able to share data because of differing systems. Both Conservative and Labour governments have identified this as the main reason for bottlenecks in the health system and claimed that resolving the problem would lead to improvements to care. However, organizations like Medact, Just Treatment, and Corporate Watch warn that entrusting this task to Palantir could deepen issues rather than solve them.
Similarly, many health experts have highlighted how the FDP would effectively lock the NHS into dependency on Palantir. The company’s systems are designed in a way to make data extraction difficult and integration with industry-standard analytics costly and complicated, so users are compelled to keep using them. “Palantir’s system pushes people to its own proprietary systems; and switching costs [for the NHS] will be very high,” Doctors’ Association and Foxglove warned in a 2023 report.
The current government is pushing forward with this form of private sector expansion in the NHS despite warnings from trusts and experts that the results will fall far short of expectations. In fact, some NHS organizations being forced to adopt the FDP under Labour’s administration have said that the new platform could result in a loss of functionality compared to the systems they currently rely on.
While there is general agreement among analysts that data sharing and usage within the NHS could be significantly improved, they argue that these improvements can and should be achieved through local and regional initiatives. In contrast to the top-down model ushered in by the FDP, these initiatives would build on existing systems and expertise, avoiding handing over control to a private company with a track record of human rights abuses.
Concerns that the FDP could make the NHS entirely dependent on Palantir are sharpened by fears over how patient data might be used. As one of the world’s largest public healthcare systems, the NHS holds an unique health dataset. While such data has immense potential to strengthen public services, entrusting it to corporate partners poses great risks. For instance, it could be exploited for purposes such as tracking and criminalizing migrants—a practice that has been systematically pursued under Britain’s hostile environment policies.
Palantir takes pride in finding new applications for data, specifically to reinforce Western dominance. Given that the full scope of the FDP remains unclear, there is significant concern that NHS data could also be exploited to boost Palantir’s surveillance tools. These tools are already being deployed in Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Palantir’s leadership has been outspoken in its support for Israel, openly aligning with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government even as it proceeded to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians. The company is actively testing—or rather, showcasing—its artificial intelligence (AI) models through Israel’s attacks in Palestine and Lebanon. This indicates a clear intent to monetize these tools further by marketing them to other states preparing to go on killing sprees.
Handing over NHS medical data to Palantir would deepen the Starmer administration’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes, health justice organizations warn. Such a move risks staining the NHS’s reputation, turning its dataset into a tool for oppression internationally while undermining public trust in the healthcare system at home.
Many had hoped that a change in government in July would mean an end to the FDP. However, “instead of hitting reset, Labour hit accelerate,” Just Treatment remarked during a No Palantir in the NHS meeting in November. This response reflects Labour’s priorities when it comes to the public healthcare provider. “If the government were setting out to implement reforms in the way that our data is held to improve health outcomes and improve the NHS, they would be going about it in a way that maximizes public trust, maximizes public and health service and health worker support for those initiatives,” the organization remarked during the meeting.
Instead, the government appears more interested in using national health data for economic gain. This approach aligns closely with recommendations from neoliberal policy advisors, such as those at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who have recently called for the use of NHS data as a means to boost Britain’s economic standing.
Although the implementation of the FDP is progressing, activists argue that it is not too late to stop it—especially if local groups escalate their efforts. They emphasize that by increasing pressure, health workers and activists could not only push for the cancellation of Palantir’s FDP contract but also demand the termination of all agreements with companies complicit in Israel’s occupation. While Palantir is currently a key focus, the organizations highlighted that this campaign is just the beginning, serving as a starting point for broader action.
