“If Burnham really is as different from Starmer as he claims, he will need to break from Starmer’s status quo. This means a new attitude to public services.”
By Lucy Nichols, Keep Our NHS Public
The NHS ought to be a priority for any incoming Prime Minister. At present, our health service, as anyone can see, is unable to meet the needs of the population it serves. We have faced a decade and a half of chronic underfunding and undermining by successive governments, including the latest Labour government. Andy Burnham has the opportunity to turn around many of the mistakes made by Keir Starmer’s government, and drastically improve the NHS.
For 15 years and more, Governments and politicians have failed the NHS. Funding is nowhere near where it ought to be, private companies are leeching off the health service, staff pay and working conditions are unacceptable, and patient outcomes are suffering. We are repeatedly told the NHS crisis is inevitable. We are told that the NHS is broken beyond repair. Staffing culture, the public’s personal choices, and NHS management are often positioned as responsible for this.
All of this ignores the wider system failure: too few beds, delayed discharge, insufficient social care, staff shortages and years of lost capacity. It is also linked to pressure in other parts of the system, including general practice, dentistry, maternity, mental health and community care.
Burnham can, and should, turn this around. We have already written to him about our hopes for his leadership, and encourage him to listen to the NHS activists who have been fighting for a better NHS for years.
His priorities should be ending private sector involvement in the NHS, improving working conditions and staffing numbers and providing the NHS with the funding it needs. More than this, however, Burnham should commit to the NHS as an ideological project. This is where Wes Streeting, whose tenure was characterised by privatisation and chaos, failed. It was clear, almost from the start, that Streeting did not believe in the NHS as a truly public service, instead choosing to lean on non-existent ‘spare capacity’ in the private sector and the goodwill of private companies to improve patient outcomes.
Aside from some minor improvements that Streeting hailed as major successes, for instance in ostensibly reducing some waiting lists (although this largely involved removing patients from waiting lists), his strategy did not work. The NHS is in just as dire a situation today as when Streeting became Health Secretary two years ago. James Murray has continued along Streeting’s lines, saying he wants to continue Streeting’s brilliant work, and also failed to introduce any real change, although he has not been Health Secretary for long.
If Burnham really is as different from Starmer as he claims, he will need to break from Starmer’s status quo. This means a new attitude to public services. They ought to be seen as a crucial investment in the UK economy, and not an expensive burden. This applies to education or transport, just as it does to the NHS. Rather than continuing Streeting and Murray’s ineffective strategies, Burnham ought to look at the NHS as a crucial part of a healthy population and economy and treat it accordingly.
It is very encouraging that Burnham has already made clear his opposition to Palantir’s involvement in the NHS. We hope that he can extend this opposition to private involvement to all the for-profit companies that suck money out of the health service and social care.
Burnham will likely come up against all manner of hurdles when it comes to the NHS, including attacks from the right. Nigel Farage has spoken in favour of abolishing the NHS altogether and introducing an insurance-based system similar to that in the USA. Donald Trump is also closing in on the NHS with a US-UK drug deal that could end up costing the NHS millions. These are issues that must be fought politically. The growth of Reform – although being undermined by Farage himself – and parties even further to the right can, in part, be fought by fighting for better public services that do not leave their voters in the desperate situations that led them rightwards.
Though public satisfaction with the NHS is about as low as it has ever been, the UK public generally believes in the NHS as a truly public service. NHS staff – medical or otherwise – are committed to the health service, and various health unions back Keep Our NHS Public’s campaign for a publicly funded, provided and accountable NHS. A strong NHS is needed for a healthy population and, in turn, a stronger economy. This requires not only policy change, but a political and ideological commitment to a truly public health service, with a return to the values of Nye Bevan when he founded the NHS in 1948.
- Lucy Nichols is Campaigns Officer at Keep Our NHS Public.
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