I AGREE with Sue Hawking’s letter last week pointing out the futility of blaming others for a financial crisis in the NHS.

However, I would also like to point out that Robertpaterson3, in picking on overweight people, plays straight into the hands of the government/national media hype over this subject.

Playing blame games diverts attention away from what is happening in health provision and enables the government (and previous governments) to fulfil a long-planned demise of a comprehensive, universal, publicly-owned health service.

Five years on from the first demo against local NHS privatisation in Stroud, the national press routinely publish tales of NHS trusts running a national deficit of anything up to £3 billion.

Apparently, drastic action is needed or services will break down as our hospitals go bankrupt.

In spite of this, the NHS is being made to find savings of £22 billion.

This is the main premise upon which the biggest reconfiguration ever of the NHS is being undertaken behind closed doors, right now, including in Gloucestershire.

The ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plans’ (STPs) are spread over 44 ‘Footprint’ areas.

Each area has to find ways to close three ‘gaps’ – the ‘health and wellbeing gap’, the ‘care and quality gap’ and the ‘financial and efficiency gap’.

Only a tiny handful of these plans have been shown to the public, even though they are to be rolled out next year.

So, if you thought you had already seen cuts to the NHS, next year will mark the start in earnest of £22 billion of cuts and, by only the next financial year, the £3 billion deficit must eliminated.

The NHS regulator, NHS Improvement, has instructed organisations to list services which could be axed or centralised, and make “rapid progress” now.

Work done by Caroline Molloy, health researcher and OpenDemocracy.net/ournhs editor, highlighted the STPs’ main shortcomings – not enough money, lack of any evidence that plans will: a) work or b) save any money and c) secrecy combined with a lack of democracy.

As one of the steering committee for the national group Keep Our NHS Public said: “This is an outlaw process. STPs have no statutory basis and no formal, accountable governance process”.

The blame culture in the NHS is being used to mask these plans. and keep a questioning public from taking too much interest.

Only one side of the finance story is being publicised.

Health Care Audit, a group of finance and business consultants, wrote an analysis of the Department of Health’s latest annual report and accounts, showing how there was in fact adequate money to cover the deficit.

The Department of Health simply chose not to.

Or, as Health Care Audit’s director, Roger Steer, put it: “There is as yet no crisis that justifies panic moves to cut services, close hospitals, lay off staff or open pointless debates over ‘new’ ways of funding the NHS.”

On top of this, the cost of running the NHS as a marketised and increasingly fragmented business was estimated at around 14 per cent of the NHS budget by a House of Commons Select Committee in 2010 and we know these costs have since increased.

Clearly the coalition government did not want to hear this. They embargoed the publication of the results – indefinitely.

On November 4 however, the NHS Reinstatement Bill, an alternative to the wastefulness of running the NHS as a market, will go for its second reading in Parliament and I would ask everyone who cares about the NHS to find out about it nhsbill2015.org/

Hannah Basson

Stroud Against the Cuts (Affiliated to Keep Our NHS Public)