Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

[bluebottle]

I had this emailed to me today. Having much to thank the NHS for over the years, I would encourage LBs to sign the open letter to Jeremy Hunt.


Have a look at this:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/Hunt-letter

Jeremy Hunt has been announced as the new Health Secretary, replacing Andrew Lansley. This means he is now the minister responsible for the NHS, so it is really crucial that he understands just how important our NHS is.

If enough of us sign the open letter telling him that we'll stand strong to protect our NHS, then he will realise that we mean business. Let's make it clear that we'll challenge him every step of the way if we need to.

Please sign the open letter now:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/Hunt-letter

Thank you for your support. Remember - it is YOUR NHS.

[dogtired]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

signed

[enaid]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Signed, can't help thinking he is the wrong man for the job though.

ps posted on Facebook too

[Nic]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Signed

[Sapphire]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Signed and on Facebook

[paul123]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

signed

[swifty]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

signed, 77407 signed it so far today, not far off 85000 they want for today

[stephen25000]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

signed

[Bill-K]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Just under 80,500 when I signed. Looking at Swifty's time and figure, it looks like over 3,000 per hour - so hopefully, another couple of hours will do it !!!

[Hurricane Puffrose]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

signed and commented

We need investment not cuts, nurses who will nurse and student nurses not afraid to ask questions. You cannot get this with nurses so over worked they dont know what they are doing, doctors who are so stressed they think its next week and management spending millions on mission statements and H&S notices! How can you condone losing our NHS when you earn more than 3 nurses put together?

p

[enaid]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Maybe his first job would be to sort this lot out


As crippling repayments on private finance initiative (PFI) contracts force NHS hospitals to make cuts, a new report reveals that the firms profiting from the deals are using tax havens to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax.
A report by the European Services Strategy Unit, and covered in the Sunday Times, reveals that as many as 70 NHS PFI projects are based off-shore.
Expensive PFI contracts have become a huge burden on dozens of NHS trusts. Last week the government announced that ‘hit squads’ of senior government auditors are to be dispatched to seven NHS trusts who are struggling to pay PFI bills. Earlier this year, South London Healthcare Trust, which manages three South London hospitals, was the first trust forced into administration after its £61m annual PFI bills saw the trust’s budget deficit spiral unsustainably.
These budgetry black holes are having a real impact on patient care. In a paper for the British Medical Journal, academic Alyson Pollack claims that hospitals blighted by expensive PFI contracts are compromising on care, reducing staff numbers and cutting frontline services.
The findings of the European Services Strategy Unit report make particularly unsavoury reading given this backdrop of threatened patient care.
The Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich, one of those run by the distressed South London Healthcare Trust, is just one of the PFI contracts implicated in the report.
The first hospital in London to be built with PFI money, the Queen Elizabeth is part-owned by three separate funds: Semperian PPP Investment Partners, Innisfree and John Laing Infrastructure Fund (JLIF). Guernsey-based JLIF owns over a quarter of the hospital along with a raft of other PFI stakes in hospital, housing and school-building projects. The firm paid just 2.5% tax on a £14.62m profit in the first six months of its financial year.
The revelations are not the first time that PFI firms have been shown to use off-shore companies. In April last year a BBC investigation revealed that HICL, an HSBC-established fund and one of the country’s biggest investors in PFI contracts, was paying less than half a percent tax on its £38m profit. Its portfolio of PFI investments included stakes in Portsmouth Hospital and the John Radcliffe in Oxford.
A spokesman for JLIF said said its infrastructure assets in the UK ‘pay normal corporation tax rates in the UK and the shareholders in JLIF pay tax on dividends and capital gains arising from their shares.’
HICL Infrastructure said it had registered in Guernsey because it could not list on the London Stock Exchange without a trading history. The company said it invested in a large number of companies which were incorporated in the UK and subject to UK tax.
Established under John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s before being massively expanded under Blair, PFI committed dozens of NHS trusts to contracts that soon became absurdly expensive and unsustainable. A 2007 NHS report found that fixed running costs (cleaning, maintenance etc.) at PFI-funded hospitals were often twice as high as the equivalent services at hospitals not locked in to long term contracts with private firms.
Earlier this year, the Guardian calculated that paying off current PFI contracts would ultimately cost Britain £300bn. Hospital buildings account for £70bn of this figure.
Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee and now a fierce critic of PFI deals, has attacked the schemes as ‘extremely inefficient’. A report by the PAC estimated that the contracts were costing taxpayers four times what they were worth. Commenting on revelations that PFI firms are engaging in tax avoidance schemes Hodge said: ‘It is shocking. Those who write PFI contracts should now insist the companies stay onshore. If they don’t like it, they can walk away.’
Hodge’s bravado is all very well, but it seems in reality neither the Labour opposition nor the current coalition know how to go about untangling the NHS from the web of private finance contracts. Although the leaders of the three major parties have so far stopped short of promising to actively renegotiate PFI contracts, the idea has been mooted by an odd cross-party coalition of backbenchers. A parliamentary campaign named PFI Rebate, and run by Conservative Jesse Norman has won support for revisiting the contracts from dozens of Tory, Lib Dem and Labour MPs.
The detail of Norman’s plan is telling: there is no proposal for a mandate or new legislation, simply a polite request to the funds themselves to voluntarily give back ‘a small portion of their profits to the taxpayer’. It seems that the curse of these terribly negotiated contracts will be hanging over the NHS for years.
Read the Sunday Times write up of the European Services Strategy Unit’s findings (behind a paywall) here.



http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com...llions-in-tax/

[bluebottle]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

This arrived in my email inbox a few minutes ago. The number of signatures has increased by around 30,000 since yesterday.

Here's a message he can't ignore! Jeremy Hunt has only been in charge of the NHS for a couple of days. But already an amazing 111,681 of us have put our names to a people-powered warning for him: we will work together to block any new threats to our health service. [1]

Now let's prove we really mean business, and put our message where he really won't want to see it. Can you chip in to splash our warning to Jeremy Hunt across a full-page advert in The Telegraph or The Times?

It costs at least £35,000 to buy a prominent full page advert in one of these Conservative-leaning papers.[2] If enough of us donate in the next 24 hours, we can be in the paper on Tuesday morning. Can you make a donation now?

Click here to preview the advert and to make a secure donation:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/donate-Hunt-open-letter



Like most politicians, Hunt takes what he sees in the papers very seriously – particularly papers like The Times and The Telegraph that support the Conservatives. Checking the papers will be one of the first things he does on Tuesday morning. So if enough of us chip in, we can make sure he comes face to face with us while he's having his breakfast!

I wonder if it will make him choke on his cornflakes? Lol!

[Bill-K]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Not sure if he'll choke on his cornflakes, but it may make him check one more time that he's tucked his shirt in and done his zip up before he leaves for work - and checked his closet for skeletons...

[enaid]

Re: Save the NHS - Hold Jeremy Hunt to Account

Message sent! 121,227 of us signed and thousands of us donated. Today, when the new health minister Jeremy Hunt looks through his morning newspapers, this is what he will see:



Thank you for being part of this. Together we’ve shown Jeremy Hunt just how determined we are to protect our NHS. We’ve got our message to him when it matters most – just as he’s starting his new job. That should make him think twice about pushing through further dangerous changes, cuts or privatisation.

It’s two years since 38 Degrees members first voted to make protecting the NHS top priority. Since then, we've done a huge amount together. Petitions, local meetings, messages to our MPs, billboard advertisements, legal submissions, newspaper ads, the list goes on! Now we’ve made it clear to the new minister that we’re not about to give up: we’ll keep campaigning as long as the NHS is at risk.

38 Degrees members know how important it is to have a decent health service which we can all rely on, whether we're rich or poor. We know that the NHS is something Britain can be proud of. And each of us knows that we’re not alone – there are thousands of other 38 Degrees members, all across the UK, all ready to work together to protect our health service.


Thanks for being part of this,

David, Becky, Marie and the 38 Degrees team