SPEAKERS:

DM: Dermot Murnaghan

AB: Andy Burnham

DM: Dividing lines in UK politics of course, should it be provided wholly by the state or should some commercial providers be used to fill in the gaps. Well there’s a key vote in the House of Lords on that next week and campaigners say it could lead to privatisation of the NHS. I’m joined now from Leigh by the Shadow Health Secretary. Andy Burnham, very good morning to you Mr Burnham. I mean I mentioned there privatisation...

AB: Good morning.

DM: …which has become a dirty word in relation to the NHS with some campaigners. But of course private providers provided services to the NHS long before even you became Secretary of State for Health.

AB: Yes there’s been a long standing role, providing a supporting role on the fringes of the NHS but what we’re seeing happening now is quite different. The scale and pace of privatisation is proceeding really at a frightening pace and we’re, labour’s revealing today, that there’s been for instance a tenfold increase in private provision within the London Ambulance Service with private crews attending blue light, 999 calls. Now this is how the NHS is changing under David Cameron and there’s this crucial vote looming in the Lords next week. You will remember when we were discussing the bill that went through Parliament, the government was saying oh well doctors will decide how care will be provided well these regulations mandate market tendering on the medical profession. It’s back door privatisation and that is why so many people feel so angry about what’s happening.

DM: You’ve got to be careful though haven’t you Mr Burnham about undermining all the great that’s done within the NHS. You mentioned there some of the dire warnings you used to voice on this programme amongst others is that as the bill went through Parliament but the NHS doesn’t seem to have fallen apart, the changes are being implemented, I accessed some of the services myself last week, it’s still working.

AB: Well Dermott the NHS is under intense pressure at the moment. Hospitals are really sailing close to the wind dangerously full. You’ll see queues of ambulances around the country outside A&Es we’ve had just short of five thousand nursing posts cut since the… since David Cameron entered Downing Street and you know that illustrates the folly of siphoning three billion pounds out of the NHS front line to pay for a back office reorganisation. You know I think hospitals are under intense pressure at the moment, corners are being cut and I am worried for the NHS at the current moment.

DM: I mean it all throws into sharp relief, you mention there the three billion pounds you say has been taken out of frontline services but it’s not been taken out of the NHS and there’s pressure now isn’t there on you, on the front bench of the Labour Party to tell us what your spending plans would be. Would the NHS be one of those services on which you’d like to spend more money than the current government?

AB: Well of course the NHS will always be a top priority for Labour that goes without saying Dermott, but I can’t plan looking into the future for new money that will just be handed over. Of course it will be protected but I’ve got to plan on the basis that we need to get more for the money that we currently put in so that is why tomorrow Ed Miliband and I will say more about our plan to fully integrate health and social care. We believe in the century of the aging society it’s time to bring social care together with physical and mental health care. And that is new thinking that’s coming from the Labour Party that is about doing more with the money that we currently put into our care system in England.

DM: Okay that’s on the NHS but what about this point that was raised by the Fabian Society wasn’t it last week, when it was said that Labour is going to be prepared to say that it will spend more than the projections of the current government if it came into power. Is that something you back, this level of clarity with voters?

AB: Well that’s a decision for Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. We have a government spending review looming in June and obviously they’ll have to make that judgement at the right time depending on the state of the economy but you know we’ve said all along Dermott that the government has been cutting too far and too fast and because of that, they’ve taken money out of the economy, they’ve not supported growth and I think that’s plain for everybody to see the economy isn’t going anywhere and because of that the costs of paying for failure are going up, the costs of supporting people who are unemployed. So these judgements will come at the right time but you know I’m not making any imprudent assumptions. I’m planning for a world that will be tough and that’s why I want to look at that one hundred billion NHS budget, the twenty or so billion we spend on adult social care. I’m saying if I brought those budgets together in one single service, one hundred and twenty billion, could I get better results for people and I think I could because if we better supported people in the home, I think we could avoid spending thousands of pounds paying for failure by having people, older people in hospitals.

DM: Okay Mr Burnham, good to talk to you thank you very much indeed, Andy Burnham there, Shadow Health Secretary.

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