Blog: Why the Health and Care Bill is so important

By UNISON head of health Sara Gorton UNISON was among the earliest and fiercest critics of the 2012 ‘Lansley’ Act, which extended the scope for privatisation of the NHS in England, and made NHS services subject to unwieldy competition and procurement regulations. It also encouraged fragmentation and disrupted the service by creating and moving tens of thousands of people into a series of new ‘arms-length bodies’. Since the 2012 Act, UNISON has lobbied for changes – not just to get us back to pre-2012 standing, but to reinstate the principles of collaboration, social value and integration as well as explicitly setting out an ‘NHS first’ principle, so that external providers are only ever used when there is no NHS alternative. Over the last few years, many of the national bodies established in the 2012 Act have been re-named, re-organised or had their mandates drastically altered – for example, NHS England and Improvement (which manages funding, standards and performance of the NHS in England) do not exist in the Act, creating a lack of transparency as well as a variety of employment issues for people working in those structures. In 2019, UNISON worked with a series of other organisations to set out a consensus position that would, very quickly, enable the removal of the worst aspects of ‘Lansley’ – those elements that left the NHS subject to competition law and wasted time and money through pointless procurement exercises. This consensus was tested throu...
Source: UNISON Health care news - Category: UK Health Authors: Tags: Article Blogs health Source Type: news