In light of Labour’s failure to address in any serious way the issue of NHS funding in its manifesto, the new plan to hand already limited NHS resources to private care homes is puzzling. After 15 years of government cuts to local authority budgets, social care is dominated by private-equity-owned companies, extracting billions in profits from the social care system. Handing NHS cash to them makes little economic sense and worsens an already big problem.
Research by the public ownership campaign group We Own It analysed more than 72,000 NHS outsourcing contracts worth more than £130bn and using company profit margins estimated that private firms made £6.7bn, or £10m a week, from NHS contracts since 2012. We Own It activists delivered this research to Wes Streeting’s constituency office on 17 June.
