LABOUR health secretary Wes Streeting has proposed NHS bosses pocketing £30,000 bonuses under a new plan he has devised which he claims will incentivise them to cut waiting lists.
Hospital chief executives, who already receive six figure salaries, are being told that they can earn an extra 10% bonus for reducing waiting lists and managing budgets.
Of the 2,015 NHS trust leaders in England, at least 10 earned a massive salary in excess of £300,000 in the year 2023-24.
Streeting is insisting that his plan is to impose a ‘carrot and stick’ performance management regime that would mirror those used in private businesses and corporations to incentivise better performance and more profit for shareholders.
In other words, Streeting is proposing to completely remodel the 125 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards in England along the lines of the private healthcare companies that Streeting and Labour intend to take over the health services.
Chief executives who take over hospital trusts struggling with funding cuts and waiting lists would be given a £45,000 payment for taking on the job.
Streeting boasted: ‘Some of the best businesses and most effective organisations across Britain and the world reward their top talent so they can keep on delivering. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same in our NHS.’
The ‘stick’ element in Streeting’s plan, is the threat that bosses of hospitals with long waiting lists or that overspend their budget would be denied an annual pay rise – which last year gave them up to an extra £15,000 – forcing them to survive on their meagre salaries of £300,000.
The Royal College of Nursing’s Patricia Marquis, Executive Director of RCN England, responded to Labour’s proposal to reward bosses with performance bonuses saying: ‘Attracting talent to the NHS is important, but no NHS boss could succeed without us. We are the largest workforce in the health service and deliver the vast majority of care for patients.’
Marquis continued: ‘Talk of bonuses for hospital chiefs higher than a nurses annual salary will leave a sour taste in the mouths of nursing staff. We are still waiting for a pay award that should have arrived six weeks ago.’
Labour ministers have made it clear that any pay award for nurses or resident doctors (previously known as junior doctors) that exceeded the 2.8%, they insist is all the Labour government is prepared to pay, must come out of the budgets of hospitals and trusts.
This drive to make nurses and doctors pay for the NHS by imposing pay levels that keep their wages frozen below what they had in 2008, has been accompanied by Streeting imposing a brutal cost-cutting regime that could wipe-out 100,000 NHS jobs.
Labour abolished NHS England under plans announced by Keir Starmer to ‘save’ up to £800 million by making staff redundant, paving the way for the complete break-up of the NHS, and this latest ploy by Streeting of introducing massive bonuses for chief executives to cut spending, while at the same time cutting waiting lists, is another part of the plan to fully privatise the health service.
The BMA announced this month that resident doctors in England will be balloted on strike action over pay, while the RCN chief executive Professor Nicola Ranger last week, issued a warning that nurses will ‘bare their teeth’ in pursuit of a proper pay rise this year. Nurses and other NHS workers have yet to receive a formal pay offer for 2025.
Now is the time when the NHS must be defended by the entire working class from a reactionary Labour government, determined to destroy what was the greatest social gain made by workers.
Nurses, doctors and NHS workers must not be left to fight the attacks by this Labour government on the NHS on their own.
Workers must now demand that the TUC organise the entire trade union movement in a general strike to defend the NHS from the privateers by kicking out this treacherous Labour government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
Labour’s war on the NHS must be defeated with the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
