Hewitt refutes ‘stealth privatisation’ claims

Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary has refuted claims that the NHS is being privatised.

An advert in the Official Journal of the European Union invited private firms to look at managing the budgets of primary care trusts, prompting union leaders to criticise the Department of Health for attempting to privatise the NHS by stealth.

Ms Hewitt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the NHS would continue being free at the point of care for all patients and added that the advert “did not reflect government policy”. It has since been withdrawn, she added.

She said the department was investigating why the advert was published and insisted: “The important thing that I want to make clear here is that primary care trusts are public statutory bodies, they are responsible for using these very large budgets that we have given them to commission the best possible services for local people.”

“They can never outsource that responsibility,” she added.

The health secretary concluded by saying that primary care trusts would have the choice of hiring private companies to provide “specialist management support services” and denied that this amounted to “privatising commissioning”.

Last week, the British Medical Association’s Keep Our NHS Public campaign, run by some of its members, said it dealt a “severe blow” to the NHS market reforms that some had said bore some hallmarks of privatisation.

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