NHS trusts have been asked to make drastic cuts as the service faces a predicted shortfall of nearly £7 billion, health leaders warned today.
In a survey for NHS Providers, 47 per cent of trust leaders warned they are rolling back services to balance the books, while another 43 per cent are considering doing so.
Rehabilitation centres, talking therapies and diabetes services for young people are among services at risk.Eighty-six per cent of respondents said their organisation is having to cut jobs in non-clinical teams, while 37 per cent plan to cut clinical posts. A number of trusts are aiming to cut 500 jobs or more, with one planning as many as 1,000.NHS union Unison’s head of health Helga Pile said: “Ministers shouldn’t be insisting trusts balance their books while ignoring the damaging consequences for patient care and a demoralised workforce. “The NHS needs more staff — not fewer workers — if delays and waits for patients are to end.”It comes as NHS chief executive Sir Jim Mackey told a Medical Journalists Association event in London the service had “maxed out on what is affordable.” He said that the NHS was likely to have a £6.6bn deficit this year, despite a budget of around £200bn.
Though he has demanded unprecedented savings, he slammed the “normalisation” of poor care, saying that, 10 years ago, “we would have never accepted old ladies being on corridors next to an [A&E] department for hours on end.”We Own It founder and director Cat Hobbs said: “Back in 2012, the NHS was rated as the best healthcare service in the world. “That was before the legislation that deliberately opened up our whole NHS to profiteering. “Sir Jim Mackey is absolutely right to say that patients being treated in corridors and car parks is unacceptable. If he wants to stop this scandal while saving money, he must end privatisation as quickly as possible.
George Osborne and NHS nurses. This image is not one of mine, I need to search again for the source. later: I searched for the author and found it attributed to one person. Unless it’s done deliberately to look amateur (which it could be), I doubt that it’s him & not signed it anyway so probably doesn’t want attribution.
CHPI thinktank found five firms made an ‘eye-watering’ £169m in 2023-24, as calls for profit cap grow
Profits made from treating NHS eye patients by five private firms are so large they equal those made by the 100 with private finance initiative (PFI) hospital contracts, research shows.
The disclosure has led to calls for ministers to cap what can be “eye-watering” levels of profit made by private operators when they take over key public services.
Research by the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) thinktank found the five main companies providing cataract removals and other eye treatments to the NHS in England made an estimated £169m in profit collectively during 2023-24 – the same profit generated by the 100 PFI deals.
David Rowland of the CHPI, who carried out the research, said: “For years the biggest scandal of wasted money in the NHS has been PFI, with huge amounts of taxpayer money leaking out of the health system and into the profit accounts of private firms.
“But our research shows that the outsourcing of NHS eye care is an even bigger scandal. Just five eye care companies have generated the same profits in one year as the companies running all 100 NHS PFI schemes.”
A general view of medical equipment on a NHS hospital ward at Ealing Hospital in London
NHS outsourcing is fuelling inequality and lengthening waiting times, with wealthier patients receiving faster treatment than poorer ones, a study revealed today.
Researchers found that expanding private providers into NHS-funded care has reduced surgical admissions at NHS hospitals and driven up waiting times across the board.
Private hospitals are disproportionately located in wealthier areas and poorer patients, who are often sicker, are less likely to be admitted.With NHS capacity under pressure, the study warned that those on lower incomes are now waiting longer for care, receiving less support at home and facing greater barriers in travelling to private hospitals. On average, patients treated by private providers via the NHS waited only half as long as those treated in NHS hospitals.The poorest 20 per cent of patients are significantly less likely to be treated in the private sector and face longer waiting times than the wealthiest 20 per cent.Between 2003 and 2008, when private involvement in NHS treatment was minimal, surgical admissions rose and waiting times more than halved. But from 2008 onwards, as private sector provision expanded, NHS capacity fell and waiting times increased.Study co-author Professor Allyson Pollock of Newcastle University said: “The private sector is now substituting for, not adding to, NHS capacity.
‘A wholesale betrayal of the people and our environment’
Campaigners say privatised water has failed the public and the environment
REGULATORS have fuelled soaring water bills by not encouraging private companies to spend “what they need to deliver the performance expected,” a damning public spending watchdog report concluded today.
The National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted “inconsistent responsibilities” and gaps in oversight within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the sector’s regulators.
The watchdog examined the effectiveness of sector regulators — Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate — as well as Defra, which sets policies for the sector in England.
It found that complex and lengthy regulatory frameworks have contributed to “worsening investor perception of the sector” which will need to attract “investment and spend at a rate not seen before” to meet its “significant environmental and supply challenges.”
NAO head Gareth Davies said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”
What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn’t just his call to urgently tackle climate change. It’s the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.
While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a “poor church for the poor”, he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage. Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world’s economic and political elites in the way he has.
However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.
The backlash has begun even before the encyclical has been officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis’s intervention.
What makes the pope so radical?
There are several meanings of the word “radical” that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.
First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, “a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals”, signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.
The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighbourhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina’s capital.
Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation.
Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. (p. 23)
This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestlé is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatisation policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.
In fact, the encyclical is a radical – for a pope and international leader, unprecedented – attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life.
The document states:
Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism … leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. (p. 149-150)
The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that “the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion.”
The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors. (p. 126)
The pope’s right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. (p. 20)
While the pope is not a politician – or maybe precisely because he is not one – he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:
Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption. There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. (p. 21)
The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.
The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis’ message: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” (p. 128)
We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world’s social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, “true world political authority” will be able to address these problems.
This article was updated on 18 June to include quotes from the final encyclical rather than the earlier draft leaked to L’Espresso magazine.
A general view of medical equipment on a NHS hospital ward at Ealing Hospital in London
