Health secretary Wes Streeting is to hand key driver of NHS privatisation Alan Milburn – he of Care UK notoriety – the role of lead non-executive director of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

It’s a clear signal of the Labour Party’s plans to further privatise the NHS. Milburn has significant conflicts of interests when it comes to public versus private healthcare.

As the Canary previously reported on Alan Milburn, him and his family have made over £8m largely from private healthcare consultancy. And that includes the mutual backscratching (to put it lightly) of making money from firms who profiteered from his healthcare outsourcing while he was in government. Milburn was health secretary under Tony Blair, from 1999 to 2003.

Care UK, Alan Milburn, and profit over patients

Alan Milburn is also a longstanding adviser to Bridgepoint Capital, which owns private healthcare company Care UK, that operates over 150 care homes.

As the Guardian reported in 2014:

Care UK has not paid a penny in corporation tax since it was bought by the private equity firm Bridgepoint Capital in 2010.

Care UK took over NHS services for people with disabilities in Doncaster in 2014. The company then cut pay for previously NHS staff by 35% and brought in 100 new workers at rock bottom salaries.

Care UK also runs the Urgent Care Centre at Ealing hospital. In 2015, ITV found that the company had untrained staff delivering clinical care and “patients were asked to self-observe, medicine stock levels were depleted and frontline staff were manipulating targets”.

A recent Oxford University study also brings the privatisation of the NHS and social care services into serious question. Between 2011 to 2023, 98% (804 out of 816) of the adult care homes that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) closed were run for profit. Yet private companies ran 82% of them.

Profiteering social care providers also receive significantly worse ratings from regulators than those ran publicly. For adult social care, for-profit firms ran services that received between 52% and 64% of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ ratings from the period of 2016-2021. By contrast, public provision of adult social care achieved between 66% and 80% of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ ratings over the same period.

This means a low quality service by local authority standards is still better than a high quality service by private sector standards.

Indeed, around a dozen Care UK branches received ratings of “require improvement” from 2013-2015. At the same time, the company received pay outs of £10.9m from its homecare business.

Yet Care UK is now set to have its boy Milburn as a non-executive director in the DHSC.

US company running NHS services

Alan Milburn has also worked for Centene Corporation, a US healthcare company. Until announcing a sale in 2023, Centene operated 58 GP surgeries across the UK to over 500,000 patients through its subsidiary Operose Health UK. This connection is a further conflict of interest. Even the Daily Mail has called Centene a “profit greedy” company.

Keep our NHS Public co-chair Dr John Puntis said that Wes Streeting:

has made it clear that he intends to promote a two-tier health service by sending patients to the private sector. This is an imitation of Alan Milburn’s approach under New Labour when he extended outsourcing of services and sought to build a market in health care.

Milburn now returning to a key position of influence indicates that Labour seeks to repeat the mistakes of the past, no doubt at the behest of those businesses that will profit, and to continue the Conservatives’ strategy of undermining the NHS through underfunding, while flying the famous banner of ‘reform’.

Puntis’ view is in line with public opinion. Survation polling has found 76% of the public want an end to NHS privatisation.

Featured image via Times Radio – YouTube

By James Wright