Dave Prentis becomes TU voice at Bank of England
(31/01/12) General secretary Dave Prentis has been appointed as a non-executive director of the Bank of England, taking up the trade union seat previously held by TUC general secretary Brendan Barber and former TGWU general secretary Bill Morris.
Mr Prentis starts his three-year term on the bank’s “Court of Dirctors” from tomorrow, 1 June.
Mr Prentis commented: “I am pleased to follow Brendan Barber and Bill Morris as a trade union voice on the body overseeing the Bank of England.
“It is important that there is a strong voice to represent the experience of ordinary working people who are going through such tough times at the moment.
“I will be following UNSION policies and representing our views in this new role.”
June 3, 2012
Marila
The Government proposes helath service reforms based on competition. Its spokesmen argue simply that the main aim is patient outcome and the best provider will give the best outcome, and so all competition is good. But the real need is for a comprehensive service, and with that there are too many tasks that cannot make a profit. Private enterprise must look for profit, and anything that cuts profit is to be avoided. So by definition it cannot be comprehensive.GP consortiums must put all work out to tender, or they face legal action from private companies. And providers can offer services at “less than the published mandatory tariff price”. This allows huge private helath care companies to undercut the NHS by offering loss leaders. If a tariff can be undercut, how can it be mandatory?The suspicion must be that the Government has no adequate answer to the danger of cherry-picking if the market is thrown open. After the quick, profitable work has gone private, the public NHS will be left as an under-resourced and withering rump.In fact in these proposals the NHS is stripped of all protection, because it loses any status as the preferred provider. GP consortiums must commission services from “any qualified provider”. It can’t just choose the local hospital simply because it is familiar and trusted.Patients now trust GPs for their independence and integrity; if GPs try to become businessmen, they compromise those precious virtues and risk destroying that trust. But much more likely, since they are medical and not business professionals, they will simply hand over commissioning to private helathcare companies. The lion’s share is then likely to go to the biggest beasts – the multi-national helathcare corporations. Which immediately creates another conflict of interest, as the same private companies become both purchaser and provider.The Monitor currently regulates the financial performance and clinical safety of NHS foundation trusts: it scrutinises hospital finances. But in the proposed reforms its function is also to “promote competition” – to enforce competition law and stop any anti-competitive activity. This means that all NHS functions and activities will have to be privately tendered.So all NHS hospitals must compete. To compete, they must cut prices and they are driven to pursue the profitable patients – which must be the private patients. Since there will be no cap on the earnings the hospitals can make from private patients, NHS patients will be pushed to the back of the queue. In this way standards of care are put at risk. When the times are hardest and need is growing, how do we avoid a two-tier service?With no protection from competition, some hospitals must fail. And they must go through a commercial insolvency process. So they are exposed to full UK and EU competition law. Simply, they are privatised at a stroke. And if a hospital collapses, what happens to the hundreds of patients in its care? We’ve seen already from the collapse of private residential and nursing homes that when elderly patients have to be transferred at very short notice, they may not survive. And who pays? Is the taxpayer left with the bill, just as when the banks failed?With such a massive enterprise as the NHS, it is simple sense to engage in trial runs to test the reforms. But the Government demands that we change now or face collapse.It has no mandate for this. David Cameron appeared on Conservative election posters saying “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS” and the manifesto promised to “stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care”. A few weeks after the election we learned the truth. NHS budgets are subjected to a 4% cut year on year, at a time when the NHS needs a 3% per year budget increase simply to stand still, in the face of an ageing population and the costs of medical technology which grow faster than inflation.The result is unbearable strain on the service and stress for the people who work in it. But at the same time a32–3 billion will be spent on making the most revolutionary and risky changes in the history of the service, at a time when the economy struggles with downward pressures as a result of the fionancial crash and the Government’s austerity programme. This almost guarantees market failures.The Government must make radical changes to its proposals, faced as it is with united opposition particularly from all the medical institutions in the country. What they and the people demand is a system focused on meeting need, not on chasing a myth of efficiency based on profit.