Petition: David Cameron please don’t hand over £780 million in NHS contracts to 11 private health firms

David Cameron just sold off a massive chunk of our NHS, in the largest healthcare privatisation deal in UK history. The contract hands over a whopping £780 million to private firms with shoddy care records, to carry out sensitive procedures like heart operations on the public purse.

Three of the for-profit companies have track records of poor care, including critical findings by the NHS’ own regulator. But they’re still being showered with fresh NHS contracts to pad their bottom line. And the worst bit is this: half of the companies benefitting from this deal are closely linked to the Tory Party.

We’ve seen what happens if we privatise our health services: we get worse care at higher cost. The sheer size of the deal means it’s virtually irreversible once it goes through. But together, we’ve stopped dodgy deals like this before — and we can force David Cameron to stop this deal, too.

Let’s stand up for the NHS. Demand the government cancels this dodgy deal now.

The scope of this move is unprecedented, and marks a huge expansion in mobile health care delivery. Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham is in disbelief: “It is outrageous that large chunks of the NHS are being parcelled up and sold off without the permission of a single person in this country.”

This sell-off of the NHS is actually meant to correct a horrible backlog created by privatisation in the first place. Dr. Jacky Davis, founding member of Keep Our NHS Public, has said the that the Tories are rushing through this ‘scorched earth policy’ ahead of an election they could lose because of the damage they’ve already done to the NHS after promising to defend it.

In just one example of how bad this deal is for anyone other than the corporations and their Tory friends involved, health services firm Vanguard has won £160m to undertake surgical procedures including heart operations. But the same company is facing legal action over botched eye operations under another NHS contract. An NHS report found that operations performed by Vanguard were “rushed”, and the results were so bad the contract was cancelled after just four days.

This needs to stop. Almost 100,000 SumOfUs supporters have spoken up against the government’s NHS privatisation scheme already. Now we need to take Cameron’s ‘privatisation isn’t happening’ refrain and make sure everyone knows the truth: it’s happening, and at a pace and scale that is positively alarming.

Let’s all tell the Coalition Government to stop selling off our precious health care service. Defend the NHS!

The SumOfUs community has already fought back against the corporate vultures trying to put their profits before the needs of patients. Together, over 250,000 of us demanded that NHS England stop the sale of our medical records and we won a crucial pause in the policy’s implementation. When thousands of us spoke up against US arms company Lockheed Martin bidding for a NHS contract, the company withdrew from the process. We’ve proven that we can challenge the corporate takeover of our NHS and now we need to step up and do so again.

With the election less than two short months away, we need to act now so the government doesn’t get away with this.

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More information:

NHS agrees largest-ever privatisation deal to tackle backlog, The Guardian, Mar 12, 2015
Tories sign largest privatisation deal in history worth £780m, The Daily Mirror, Mar 12, 2015
‘Tory scorched earth policy’: National Health Service signs biggest-ever privatization deal, RT, Mar 12, 2015