• SADLY, at a public meeting Whittington Hospital’s chief executive was unable to respond to enormous community concern and anger about the secretive partnership deal with Ryhurst, part of Rydon, the Grenfell Tower cladding contractor.

The hospital board is happy to give Rydon great powers over invaluable NHS hospital real estate for a “development” strategy with an asset-stripping sale. This is our NHS inheritance and is much needed for the future of the community’s health. It cannot be justified to wrap it up in a new-style private finance initiative arrangement.

The taxpayer is to subsidise Rydon out of NHS resources badly needed for patient care. But not if public opinion and outrage prevail. The board would have the public believe that this is a contract unique in history.

Like all hospitals, the Whittington has been starved of funds. Government policy is forcing the sale of more than £5billion of NHS property nationally to finance hospital repairs via strategic estate partnerships. Is the Whittington to be the sole exception?

The board says it will not be selling our Whittington assets – yet has no other means of rewarding Rydon. And somehow, against all experience, the board will be in total control over a highly complex contract not subject to public scrutiny. All this is not credible. It is not a solution for patients or taxpayers or the NHS.

Also unanswered is why Rydon’s awful ongoing record with Islington housing repairs is of no consequence. And why this company, under investigation by police for its role in the Grenfell tragedy, is so keenly sought by the board as a partner for improving hospital facilities and care.

Why must board members throw themselves into the arms of such an outfit? What is the blindness? What are the real links? No answers? The lack of transparency and democratic accountability over this process is not how the NHS is meant to be run.

It shows a complete lack of commitment and understanding over genuinely working with residents and patients. It means people cannot have confidence in the board’s judgement or words. It all looks murky, incompetent and utterly desperate.

An open, independent investigation of the Rydon deal is needed before NHS England finalises the contract.

If, as the board insists, it wants to work with the community then it should support the call for more publicly funded, qualified and properly-paid staff, and more beds – for NHS patients only. Our NHS staff, beds and facilities should not be used for private insurance care as is happening more and more, up to 49 per cent nationally.

The board should support the call for immediate full public funding of patient care, not taxpayers’ funding of marketing in the NHS, with an army of hugely-expensive management consultants, contract managers, lawyers, accountants and administrators taking away many billions each year from patient services.

The public NHS has been about cooperation, compassion, dedication and collective innovative problem solving. To be true to its values, the NHS cannot be about competition, secret deals, subsidising private profits and dividends, suing the taxpayer over lost contracts, and walking away from caring for patients as the inefficient market has shown here and in the US.

It is well known that chronic underfunding and the deliberate breaking down of the public NHS under the 2012 Health and Social Care Act have left hospitals high and dry.

Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are driving deep and dangerous cuts throughout the NHS, including around £900million worth of cuts in North Central London NHS, covering Camden, Islington, Haringey, Enfield and Barnet.

STPs have been largely discredited by well-regarded doctors and professors as unworkable and highly detrimental to patient care. Now Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs), which are American, commercial, insurance-based systems, are the new demolition tool of those in charge of what is left of the public NHS.

Judicial reviews are being launched to challenge health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s and NHS head Simon Stevens’ right to impose ACOs on the NHS.

Will the Whittington board support a return to an NHS for the people, by the people, of the people? Or support the usurpers of the NHS name, who in their anti-modern thinking are taking us backwards to dark times of poor or no healthcare for the majority?

It would be good if the board were to get together with the rest of the hospitals in the country suffering strangulation and speak truth to power. Local and national communities would back the board. Otherwise, we will soon have no NHS to speak of, and boards like Whittington’s will have only been enabling, administrative pawns in the abolition of the country’s greatest modern institution.

The Whittington community is helping to lead the way for a restoration of the best value-for-money and most equitable healthcare system in the world. The one with a unique, caring, professional ethos and practice. The true, fully public NHS. I would ask the hospital board: Please join in.

SHARON LYTTON
N6