Prime minister Cameron’s adviser Mark Britnell has urged that the NHS be ‘shown no mercy’, adding that the government’s planned health ‘reform’ is a ‘big opportunity to make profits’.
Britnell, a former director of commissioning for the NHS, is now head of health at the accountancy giant KPMG.
Speaking to a private health firms executives’ conference in New York last October, organised by private equity company Apax, Britnell claimed that the NHS could be improved by charging patients.
He said: ‘In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider, not a deliverer.’
He assured the gathered privateers: ‘The NHS will be shown no mercy and the time to take advantage will be the next couple of years.’
The conference brochure quoted him as saying: ‘GPs will have to aggregate purchasing power and there will be a big opportunity for those companies that can facilitate this process.’
Labour’s shadow health minister John Healey responded: ‘This revelation comes direct from Cameron’s inner circle and it confirms the Tories’ true purpose is a free market NHS, opening up all parts of the health service to private companies.’
Slamming his comments, Unison head of health Christina McAnea said: ‘It shows who Tories are really listening to.’
Downing Street rushed out a statement seeking to claim that Britnell was not an ‘adviser’, adding: ‘We are currently listening to experts, patients and staff on how to improve our plans.’
Writing in the Health Studies Journal, Britnell also suggested that the NHS would be better served by breaking with all services being free at the point of delivery by allowing co-payment, where patients share the costs of care and drugs.
Meanwhile, Professor Steve Field, who was called in by Cameron to chair the NHS Future Forum, set up last month to undertake the ‘listening exercise’ on the Health Bill, has dismissed the planned Health and Social Care Bill as unworkable and ‘destabilising’.
In his provisional conclusions, Field warns that a ‘free market’ competition in the NHS could ‘destroy essential services’ at both big and small hospitals.
l Construction firms are making huge profits out of a £70m Barnet Hospital PFI rebuild, by selling their shares in the project to the HSBC bank’s offshore tax haven.
A new report released by social justice watchdog, the European Services Strategy Unit, shows private companies which invested £40m in the rebuilding costs are now cashing in their shares and making profits, averaging 66.7 per cent, by selling on their stakes to banks.
The report shows that HSBC Infrastructure Company (HICL), which had originally owned 30 per cent of the investment in Barnet Hospital, now has 100 per cent sole ownership after gradually buying out the shares held by other partners in the project’s building consortium.