We urge you to chart a different course to your predecessors and prioritise investing in our NHS as a public service.”
SOS NHS, campaign groups and trade unions have written the following open letter to Andy Burnham urging him to take a different path on the NHS.
Dear Andy,
Barring something very unexpected, you will be the next leader of the Labour Party, and the country. We are writing to you as a coalition of health campaigning groups and trade unions, ahead of the 78th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, to voice our concern about the state of the National Health Service and to ask you, as the next Prime Minister, to implement a significant shift in policy to return it to its position as one of the best healthcare systems in the world.
Across nearly eight decades, our health service and the people working within it have saved and transformed countless lives, through providing quality healthcare free at the point of use. But you know that over the last 15 years our NHS has been severely damaged by cuts, chronic underfunding, fragmentation, and privatisation. This ongoing crisis has seen tens of thousands of patients needlessly losing their lives and burnt-out staff leaving faster than they can be replaced.
The 5th July also marks another important milestone: two years since this Labour government came into power. As organisations which represent patients, health workers, and the public, we have seen some small improvements—but the reality has been a series of policy decisions that have entrenched rather than repaired the damage past governments have done.
With deadly deals signed with the US and pharmaceutical industry, continued divisive conflict with workers, chaotic job cuts, acceleration in the use of profit-making companies to provide care, another dangerous wave of PFI, aggressive rollout of tech from human rights abusing corporation Palantir, worsening corridor care statistics, continuing collapse of dental care, tragic and inexcusable maternity scandals and more—it is clear that NHS policy urgently needs major surgery.
We therefore write to you today to ask you to:
- Commit to rethinking the dangerous US-UK deal on pharmaceuticals, the new PFI arrangements for neighbourhood health centres, job cuts underway in hospitals across England, increases in the use of private providers in community diagnostics and other areas, and the Palantir FDP contract.
- Meet with our coalition of workers and patients before the end of the summer recess to discuss the changes needed to restore the NHS.
- Set out a clear timetable to take NHS services and care back into the public sector over the next seven years.
In 2012, reflecting on your time as Health Secretary, you argued that past Labour governments had gone too far in privatising the NHS and that the coalition were going further and faster down that path. The current government has kept on that road. But there is now an urgent opportunity to right the wrongs of the past 15 years and more.
Following your decisive victory in Makerfield, you said that this is the Labour Party’s “final chance to change”. This is also the Labour Party’s final chance to save our NHS.
As health campaigning groups and trade unions, we urge you to chart a different course to your predecessors and prioritise investing in our NHS as a public service, so that we can celebrate decades more birthdays yet to come.
We look forward to your response and to working with you to restore the NHS and the country.
Yours faithfully,
Strike Map
Just Treatment
Keep Our NHS Public
Doctors Association UK
EveryDoctor
IWGB Union
Doctors in Unite
National Education Union
Fire Brigades Union
NASUWT
NHS Workers Say No
We Own It
Frontline19
Socialist Health Association
Health Campaigns Together
99% Organisation
Medact
Disabled People Against the Cuts
National Pensioners Convention
- You can support SOS NHS here.
- This statement was first posted by SOS NHS on 4 July 2026.
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