We speak to Keep Our NHS Public, a campaign group against privatisation and underfunding

What is Keep Our NHS Public?

Keep Our NHS Public was founded in 2005. It's a national campaigning organisation with branches all over the country. I'm the chair of the Notts group. There's been concerns for a long time that the NHS was being gradually privatised and Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) was set up to oppose that. We are not attached to any political party and will have anybody in who shares our view of the NHS. I think that's important. We will campaign on local issues and we're quite happy to criticise anybody who is doing the wrong thing.

What do you get up to in the group?

Because we are a fairly widely known campaign group, the senior managers who run the various different bits of the NHS are happy to keep us on board. We meet with them on a regular basis. Recently we met with the chief executive of the Nottingham University Hospital Trust. We meet with him and other senior managers on a fairly regular basis.

We also meet up with what's called the Integrated Care Board, which sounds very boring, but actually it's very important, because the Integrated Care Board is responsible for all NHS services in the whole of Nottinghamshire, making sure that they are offered to all members of the public. How far they succeed, another matter.

What do you believe?

One of the myths about the NHS is that it's got too expensive and we can't afford it, which is a really ignorant thing to say, because there's nothing more important, not only to the individuals and families, but also to the economy as a whole, as having people reasonably healthy.

For the last fifteen years or so, the NHS has been grossly underfunded and has been gradually under more pressure. When people complain about the NHS, it isn't really the fault of A&E, the doctors, nurses or GPs. It's the fault of the government.

The result is that every system is creaking. There are not enough midwives or ambulances, one of the reasons why there's long waiting lists is because there aren't enough GPs, and the remaining GPs are getting burnt out.

People say the NHS is too expensive. We can't afford it. But actually, if you look at the statistics for comparable countries, that is completely untrue. The British government pays 21% less than the French government for health services, and 39% less than the German government. So if they can do it, then Britain can do it as well.

One of the things that we've discovered from the meetings that we have with senior managers is that, at the moment, over 10% of health spending in Nottinghamshire in the last year was not on the NHS directly. It was going to organisations outside the NHS, mainly private companies. 10% is £279 million a year, and every pound that goes out of the NHS is a pound less to spend on NHS patient services.

What is so bad about privatisation?

Private companies are there to make a profit. Legally in Britain anyway, it's an obligation of private companies under Company Law that they should consider the interests of their shareholders before anything else.

When you get people like Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary saying we're going to get the private sector in to support the NHS - the private hospitals don’t do the same things that the NHS does. They cherry-pick the easy and cheap operations, and then leave the difficult ones to the NHS to do. This leaves people in the most need, waiting longer.

If a private sector organisation is doing an operation on behalf of the NHS, they are charging the NHS for that service. So it costs significantly more for an operation to be done by the private sector, on behalf of the NHS, than if the NHS was doing it directly itself. 

What we're concerned about is that if this process isn't reversed, we will end up with a completely two tier system like they have in America, where if you've got money, the service is brilliant. If you haven’t, it's just rubbish. That is really where privatisation leads. The NHS was set up to be a fully public service in 1947. I don't remember that, I’m not quite that old. But it's gradually becoming less and less of a public service, and that is really what we're there to oppose. 

What has been your biggest campaigning success?

There was a multinational company called Carillion that went bankrupt about six years ago. They ran the cleaning, catering and maintenance at QMC and City Hospital, and they were just awful. Both the staff and patients hated them. They were all about cost cutting. Nurses were doing the cleaning on their own wards because there weren't enough cleaners. Eventually it got to the point where there were rats seen in one of the kitchens at City Hospital. 

UB40 did a song that went ‘There's a rat in me kitchen, what am I gonna do?’ and so we managed to borrow a giant inflatable rat that was blown up like a bouncy castle. It was about twelve feet high. We set it up outside the front of the QMC and had the UB40 song, running on a loop. 

That got quite a lot of publicity, and we spent a lot of time arguing with the senior managers at the hospital and the board who had oversight of the whole operation. They kept saying, “We have taken this up with them. We're just giving them one more chance”. We were thinking, how many ‘one more chances’ are they going to get? 

This was a two year campaign, and we kept going. Eventually, the management said ‘they're in breach of contract’. They threw them out and took the services back in-house. The killer thing was that when they took the cleaning services back in-house, they had to immediately hire fifty more cleaners in order to get a basic level of cleanliness. So you can see how Carillion were making their money. 

KONP Nottingham and Nottinghamshire meet monthly at the Vat and Fiddle Pub, Queensbridge Rd. To join the group via affiliate membership, head to keepournhspublic.com

@keepournhspublic