NHS and adult social care: STP spells misery

Oliver New, Chair of Ealing Save Our NHS writes.

Grass roots campaigns to defend services are springing up everywhere, as well as national organisations like Health Campaigns Together and Keep Our NHS Public, which both have excellent websites.

Led by social criminal Jeremy Hunt, the May Government is seamlessly carrying on from the Cameron team in dismantling, privatising and above all cutting health services. Management Consultants are being paid tens of millions to devise mega cuts to services. Spin doctors are paid millions as real doctors are squeezed and even driven out of the profession or the country.

The spin doctors are pretending that our hospitals are unaffordable and too many of us are using acute services, too many selfishly dying in hospital instead of at home. Instead of going to hospital, you should go to your GP. Instead of going to the GP use Google, or your pharmacist. They are promoting glossy ‘healthy living’ programmes as a cover for service closures.

The latest vehicles for making the cuts are called Sustainability and Transformation Plans, or STPs and the way they will work is absolutely shocking.

Firstly, the NHS in England is being chopped into 44 local parts with a top bureaucrat in charge of each. Funding for NHS and local authority social care for adults is being lumped together and each of these areas instructed to make huge cuts and tender out services. All the local Councils, NHS trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups are told they must comply.

Democracy is out of the window. For a start these STP areas are far bigger than local communities. On top of that, local authority democracy, elections and voting are bypassed, along with the arrangements for public scrutiny of local NHS services. Nor was any of this voted on in Parliament by the way – it’s a dictat from Health Minister Jeremy Hunt’s Department which aims to cut £22 billion pounds by 2020.

If these brutal plans don’t work, there is no fall back. If A&Es can’t cope or lack of beds and staff shortages mean that elderly people cannot access services, if people die unnecessarily, the Government and health bosses will just shrug. The rich won’t be the ones most affected.

In North West London, where an early version of these plans has been partly implemented, two A&Es have been closed and the outcome has been a disaster. Big local campaigns have kept up the pressure. As a result Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham Labour Councils have refused to endorse their local STPs, and have now been joined by a few more. But in most cases, Labour as well as Tory Councils have just dutifully signed the papers, hoping to get promised funding for extra social care. They have agreed to massive cuts and contracting out not just of local services. Incredibly, the vast majority are signing up without even insisting on seeing the full Plans!

Jeremy Corbyn may be leader, but Labour as well as Tory Councils are effectively acting as a willing tool of the Government. Nor has Labour been serious about fighting the NHS cuts. They have an open goal, a key issue on which the Government is on the defensive. They should be putting the boot in and insisting that a Labour Government would reverse the cuts and privatisation.

There is every possibility that determination and unity of the left, community campaigns, and the Labour movement could defeat this vicious government.

We can save our NHS.