News

NHS policy U-turn is ‘costly experiment’

New Labour is launching the NHS into a ‘costly experiment’ with ‘entirely uncertain’ benefits by enthusiastically embracing the private sector, the official NHS historian Charles Webster has warned.

The Labour government has ‘far exceeded’ former Tory leader Margaret Thatcher in its move towards what once it stigmatised as ‘privatisation’, Dr Webster warns in a new edition of his NHS history, The National Health Service: a political history, published last month.

Dr Webster, a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, has added a chapter analysing New Labour policy in his account of the NHS since its foundation by Aneurin Bevan.

He says Tony Blair has made what Labour in opposition attacked as privatisation ‘central’ to his modernisation policies. Adopting the private finance initiative (PFI) was the first step towards its policy U-turn. The ‘concordat’ between the NHS and private sector announced by health secretary Alan Milburn in 2000 and moves to franchise out various services announced this year took that reversal further.

Dr Webster says: ‘On the basis of experience with PFI, private sector partners will exact a high price for any transfer of risk that they accept, in which case Mr Milburn is launching the NHS on a costly experiment, the benefits of which are uncertain.’ Such expense may well absorb most of Labour’s promised extra funds so that the taxpayers’ sacrifices will ‘accrue to the private sector balance sheets rather than the NHS patient’, he adds.

Dr Webster wrote his book before details of the decision to invite private firms to bid for franchises to run ‘failing’ NHS hospitals were announced in May.

The National Health Service: a political history, Oxford University Press. £12.99