“The NHS will be shown no mercy" says Cameron health adviser PDF Print E-mail

9 May 2011

'GPs won't have to turn to the private sector' to help with commissioning health services, said Andrew Lansley today in the Commons, trying to fend off accusations that the Tories are privatising the NHS with their reforms.

“The House knows my commitment to the NHS," he continued. “I haven’t spent seven and a half years as shadow secretary and secretary of state to see the NHS undermined, or fragmented or privatised... That was never my intention. It is not my intention.”

Privatisation was ‘never his intention’? Someone should tell that to Mark Britnell, a former high-flyer in the Department of Health, now global head of health at KPMG, and recent appointee to David Cameron’s “kitchen cabinet” of health experts to advise on health service reform.

Just six months ago, Britnell told a conference of private healthcare executives1: “In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer.”

In case there was any ambiguity in that, Britnell explained to conference delegates (in a session called 'Reform Revolution'):

“The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years."

How could Britnell, who made it into the top ten of the ‘100 most influential people in health ’ last year - as well as into No.10 - have got Lansley so wrong?

(Ref 1: Mark Britnell was speaking at a conference in October 2010 organised by private equity firm, Apax Partners. Read the conference brochure, and his quote, here.