PFI, NHS profiteering and nonsense that only the private sector is innovative. Alan Milburn is the last thing the NHS needs.

Labour Party Health secretary Wes Streeting is facing renewed criticism for bringing in Alan Milburn to meetings on NHS reform.

Well, Streeting, the Labour right, and Tories package it as ‘reform’. But really the increase in private provision of NHS services in order to milk profit from public healthcare budgets has been going on under successive governments of both parties for decades. The cosy arrangement between Tory and Labour over the matter is exemplified by the Tory-led coalition government also inviting Alan Milburn to assist them.

Alan Milburn’s rapsheet

Alan Milburn is not only a former health secretary who helped deliver Tony Blair’s private finance initiative (PFI) scams. He also champions private healthcare and has financial interests in profiteering from the basic need. Streeting himself, meanwhile, has said he wants to “go further” than Blair on NHS privatisation.

Alan Milburn was health secretary from 1999 to 2003. During his tenure, he painted his and Blair’s expansion of PFI (the use of private finance to fund NHS projects) as “PFI or bust”. This is in the vein of the establishment’s willfully economically illiterate claim that a nation with its own sovereign currency needs to rely on private sector investment for public services. PFI saw the taxpayer charged over £300bn for infrastructure with a value of £54.7bn.

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.

The myth that private sector means NHS innovation

Last year, Alan Milburn was boosting NHS private provision on GB News:

We’ve really got to think about how do we use the private sector in all of its guises. Not just private providers to treat NHS patients. But just think about all the advances we’re seeing in biomedicine… the advances we’re seeing in machine learning. They don’t come from the public sector, they come from the private sector.

Not only was he promoting the scam that sees the NHS deliberately starved of funding to bring in private profit. He also claims that healthcare advancements in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) can only come from the private sector. This is nonsense. The government already funds the Alan Turing Institute at £100m, which works on AI for healthcare.

That’s why it’s interesting that Alan Milburn uses the word “guises” here, which typically means the concealment of something. In this case, it’s the idea that the private sector is naturally more innovative and efficient than the public sector. But that’s not the case.

A technology sector worker isn’t going to urinate on his project simply because he’s receiving the same amount from a public paycheck, rather than a private one. The worker is still being paid to do a job – the difference is shareholders aren’t milking profit from something that could benefit the public sector.

The idea that the public sector isn’t innovative is completely debunked in economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State. She points out that everything that makes smart phones ‘smart’ comes from public sector investment. This includes the internet, touch screen, GPS, and voice activation.

Featured image via Times Radio – YouTube