ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON, SKY NEWS

NIALL PATERSON: The pressure on the NHS continues unabated with bed occupancy near 95% - 85% is considered to be the safe maximum level. Now Labour want to spend an additional £45 billion on the NHS over the next five years but some claim even that won’t be enough. The Shadow Health Secretary is Jon Ashworth, he joins me now from Leicester. Mr Ashworth, a very good morning to you. The winter crisis in the NHS appears to have, if not ended then certainly diminished somewhat in its severity, what lessons should we take away?

JON ASHWORTH: Well it’s been a very severe winter crisis and of course there are warnings that we could be on the verge of a very serious flu outbreak. There have been flu outbreaks in part of the country so I hope the winter crisis is diminishing as you suggest but we all hope and pray that we don’t see the flu outbreaks that some experts have been warning of. But it has been one of the worst winters in the NHS for considerable time with the number of people trapped in the backs of ambulances in this freezing cold, 100,000 trapped in an ambulance in this freezing cold beyond 30 minutes. We’ve seen people again on trolleys in corridors, I was reading a story of a woman in her 80s tied into a wheelchair because there wasn’t even a trolley for her to be on, I mean this is just totally unacceptable and of course many hospitals have been overcrowded this winter, the bed occupancy levels are well over 100% nearly 500 times so we can’t have a winter like this again. We’re calling for the government to put the money in, our Shadow Chancellor today has announced if we were in government we’d have an emergency budget to put an extra £5 billion into the NHS. We’re letting patients down, it’s not acceptable that patients have to have their operations cancelled on this scale or that they’re waiting on trolleys sometimes for almost 24 hours in their 80s, that’s not an NHS that we want. We need to put the investment in so that we can provide the best quality of care.

NP: Just to pick you up on the problems around investment. Within the past, and relatively recently in fact, the Labour party suggestion has been to increase tax on top earners, increase corporation tax but this week you’ve been suggesting that even that might not be enough with potential rises in National Insurance as under Gordon Brown and perhaps even a bespoke NHS tax.

JON ASHWORTH: I believe the best way to fund the NHS is through general taxation. I think the point I was making is that once you get into the 2020s and the 2030s, the long term trend suggests that the National Health Service and indeed the social care sector will need more funding and I think it’s important that we have a debate as a country about how we fund that. So for example in our manifesto we said we wanted to create a National Care Service to provide the levels of care that many of our elderly and vulnerable people aren’t getting at the moment. Everybody knows that the devastating cuts to social care is putting huge pressure on our NHS today and that we have to do something to resolve social care so we in our manifesto said we would consult on different proposals to fund social care in the future, whether that’s from a specific wealth tax or a care levy for employers or whatever and I think that’s a debate we should engage in but I do believe that for here and now, the best way to fund the NHS is through the general taxation changes we’re proposing which will bring in an extra five billion specifically for the NHS and another billion for social care now in 2018. We really need an injection of money today into the NHS because we cannot carry on with this NHS with people waiting on trolleys and operations being cancelled, even cancer operations being cancelled for goodness sake. Something has got to give, the NHS needs the funding urgently.

NP: Can we turn to Carillion? What should be the extent, the limits of the government’s responsibility when it comes to dealing with Carillion’s collapse? I mean who exactly, if anyone, should the government be helping and how?

JON ASHWORTH: Well it looks like the government has known about the problems with Carillion for some time and it looks from the outside that they were deliberately feeding Carillion public sector contracts to try and keep it going. Carillion in the health service is responsible for or has a 50% stake, or did have a 50% equity stake in two hospital rebuilds in Liverpool and the Sandwell area. We’ve not got any clarity about whether those hospitals will be rebuilt now and there are a number of hospital Trusts across the country, about fourteen, where Carillion were providing services for catering, for cleaning, things of that nature. Now the government has said there were contingency plans in place, we are still waiting for the exact clarity because I think it would be absolutely disastrous for patients on those wards given this winter crisis, if they are going without meals and their bed sheets aren’t being laundered.

NP: Okay Mr Ashworth, so what should the government be doing about it then please?

JON ASHWORTH: Well they need to step in and deal with those public sector contracts and bring them in-house and I think there’s a broader question now about whether the continued outsourcing of contracts works. When you look at what has happened in recent years, billions has been wasted on private sector contracts in the health service, that’s billions that should be going to patient care. For example here in Leicester, a cleaning contract that was outsourced to a different company had to be brought back in-house. In Nottingham, a Carillion contract – that was at Leicester hospitals I should have said – in Nottingham at the hospital there, Carillion’s contract for cleaning there had to be ended because they simply weren’t providing the level of service so I think we should be …

NP: All right, so the Labour party’s response is to bring those contracts back in-house. Can I just be absolutely clear on this, are you talking about all PFI contracts as John McDonnell appeared to allude to at Labour’s conference last year or are you talking specifically about some PFI contracts that don’t appear to work and leaving other PFI contracts that do in place?

JON ASHWORTH: Well there are two issues here, there are PFIs and there is the outsourcing of contracts for things like cleaning, catering, ground maintenance and things like that. Some of them are tied to PFIs, some of them are not tied to PFIs. We think the assumption where these contracts automatically go out of house because that is somehow in the interests of the taxpayer, we think that assumption has been blown apart because often when those contracts go out of house they make their money, they make their profit out of the public sector by cutting staff wages and conditions, which ultimately leads to a poorer service for patients as we have seen at the Nottingham Hospital or the Leicester Hospital where wards were simply not being cleaned, which is putting patient safety at risk. So we think there should be a presumption that contracts are generally delivered in-house and John Trickett, our Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, will be making, will be announcing more details on that policy tomorrow.

NP: But in terms of PFI, the use of private sector money rather than the state borrowing or using its own assets, does the Labour party have a fundamental problem with PFI itself to the extent that as the Shadow Chancellor appeared to suggest at Labour’s party conference, you want to bring everything back in-house?

JON ASHWORTH: Well yes we do have a problem with PFI, we don’t think it has worked and we do want to look at those contracts now and the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, has said that we will look at those various PFI contracts and look at bringing them in-house by taking over what is called the Special Purposes …

NP: But that’s a huge up-front spending commitment that the Labour party is making in addition to the what, nigh on £200 billion worth of spending commitments that some have estimated your nationalisation programme will cost.

JON ASHWORTH: The point is though as the National Audit Office showed, these PFI contracts will cost the country 200 billion over the next 20 years or so, so we have a huge debt anyway to these PFI contracts. What John McDonnell is talking about is refinancing those PFI contracts by bringing them in-house and getting a better deal for the tax payer and he believes he can do it in a way which actually saves the taxpayer money because at the moment we are being ripped off I’m afraid by these PFI contracts. Now if you go back in history, PFI was established under the John Major government so it’s a long time ago and when the Labour …

NP: They were brought in when you were an advisor to Gordon Brown weren’t they?

JON ASHWORTH: Well indeed, when the Labour government came in in ’97 it faced a backlog of £7 billion worth of repairs for schools, there were schools with literally toilets still outside and over 50 NHS, I beg your pardon sorry, over a third of NHS hospitals were over 50 years old, some of them were going back to Victorian times so that Labour government thought that the best way to rapidly upgrade infrastructure was through private finance rather than public borrowing but I think what we’ve seen now is that those deals all need to be looked at again because essentially money is flowing in dividends to shareholders and big companies, often based in offshore tax havens, and it’s not now in the public interest which is why it’s right that they should all be looked at again.

NP: But from what you are saying, all of these contracts, all of these arrangements need to be looked at again. That suggests that there are some circumstances, some situations, perhaps within the health service where there were pressures on the system, there are some circumstances in which that use of private money is justified.

JON ASHWORTH: Well it’s not an absolute position and …

NP: Well it was for your Shadow Chancellor just a few minutes ago, he said that he has been banging on about this for twenty years, he says he has always opposed PFI in all its forms.

JON ASHWORTH: Yes, but you have to look at each one, each one has a different contract and you have to go through each one very carefully but on the issue for example of PFI contracts and their connections to outsourcing, we would want to bring them in-house but there will be issues where the public sector will not necessarily have capacity. For example many hospitals used to do their laundry in-house, not every hospital has a laundry anymore so things have changed, so you have to look at each one, you have to look at the specific circumstances of every single contract but it is very clear what the direction of travel would be: we are bringing these contracts in-house because we don’t think they are anymore in the interests of the taxpayer.

NP: Whenever we have spoken in the past, Mr Ashworth, issues about the internal politics of the Labour party have never been far from the front pages. You’ll have seen the Sunday Times story and other stories about the influence of Momentum within the party. Given that Ann Black, the Chair of that subcommittee of the NEC that deals with disputes, was accepted by everyone including the incumbent, as doing a good job, why was it necessary to move her?

JON ASHWORTH: Well I don’t know. I used to, for my sins, be a member of the National Executive Committee and if I was still on the National Executive Committee I would have quite happily voted to re-nominate Ann Black to that role but I’m not on the NEC anymore. Ann Black got elected to the NEC from the Momentum slate last year or maybe the year before, I’ve slightly lost track now as I’m not a member of the NEC anymore but she was pretty fair and objective, played a straight bat and I thought she was doing an excellent job so she would have had my support.

NP: Mr Ashworth, many thanks for being with us.