Speaking at the meeting, Clive slammed the proposals saying that Greenwich CCG (our local health commissioners) had failed to follow the proper procedure when awarding the contract and had not carried out any assessment of how the privatisation would impact on our local NHS.  In addition Clive pointed out that Parliament had been misled in answers from ministers to questions he had tabled about the process followed by the CCG when letting the contract

Signing of the £73 million contract to private contractors Circle Health has now been halted at least until a proper impact assessment has been done.

Clive is now demanding that the local health commissioners scrap the whole process:  “There is nothing that the commissioners want to achieve to make services more efficient that cannot be achieved through partnerships with local NHS health providers. We do not need to go through this expensive and wasteful process.”

Clive says, “Parliament has been misinformed about the conduct of this process.  It seems NHS England allowed members of the committee that let this £74m contract to be counted more than once to make the meeting quorate.  There is no proper scrutiny and so it has been left to local MPs, residents and the council to work together to expose what is going on.”

Clive introduced a private members’ Bill in Parliament back in 2014 which would have helped save the NHS from this sort of privatisation.  Despite enjoying overwhelming support in the Commons – with only 18 MPs voting against – the Bill was talked out by Conservative backbenchers.

Please support Clive’s campaign against NHS privatisation by clicking here.