The Great NHS-Sell Off: How Labour Plans to Turn Your GP into a Private Healthcare Salesman

GPs to become Reps for Private Health Care.

In a move that would make Nye Bevan turn in his grave, the Labour Party seems hell-bent on finishing what the Tories started – the slow, insidious privatisation of our beloved National Health Service. Under the guise of ‘reform’ and ‘reducing waiting lists’, our supposed defenders of the working class are laying out the red carpet for private healthcare vultures to feast on the carcass of our public institutions.

Remember when doctors were healers rather than salespeople? Welcome to Labour’s brave new world of healthcare, where your GP earns £20 for every patient they redirect away from hospital care. This isn’t just another policy tweak – it’s the latest chapter in the slow-motion privatisation of Britain’s most cherished public institution.

Under the innocuous-sounding “Advice and Guidance scheme,” Prime Minister Starmer and Health Minister Wes Streeting are effectively transforming NHS doctors into commission-based representatives for private healthcare. Their goal? Reducing NHS waiting lists to under 18 weeks for 92% of patients. Their method? Paying GPs to explore “alternatives” to hospital treatment – a euphemism for private care that would make George Orwell proud.

Let’s strip away the political veneer and examine what’s really happening. Labour’s solution to NHS waiting lists isn’t to fix the public system – it’s to subsidise its competitors while pretending this represents ‘patient choice.’ This isn’t reform; it’s capitulation to private healthcare lobbyists.

Cash for Influence: Labour’s Top Figures Graced by Private Healthcare Donors

The numbers tell a shocking story. After a hard-fought Freedom of Information battle by the Good Law Project, NHS England was forced to reveal it paid a staggering £1.69 billion to just eight private healthcare firms during the pandemic. Circle Health, Spire Healthcare, Ramsey Health, Nuffield Health, HCA Healthcare UK, Care UK, Aspen Healthcare, and Practice Plus – these corporate giants feasted on public funds while the NHS struggled.

But it gets worse. In 2021, the NHS haemorrhaged £400 million monthly to secure private sector capacity, two-thirds of which sat idle because NHS staff were overwhelmed with COVID patients. There is not an infinite number of doctors and nurses. They cannot be in two places at once. Think about that: billions in taxpayer money paid to private companies for empty beds while NHS hospitals buckled under pressure. Yet instead of learning from this expensive debacle, Labour’s new plan doubles down on private sector dependence.

Streeting’s argument – that working-class patients deserve the same “choice” as the wealthy – sounds progressive but masks an uncomfortable truth. Every private procedure is performed by an NHS-trained doctor moonlighting for profit. Every private consultation reduces NHS capacity. This isn’t expanding choice – it’s cannibalising public healthcare to feed corporate profits, with Labour’s blessing.

The “private sector support” narrative is perhaps the greatest con in modern British politics. Private hospitals are parasites on the NHS system – they don’t train doctors, they don’t employ doctors, and they don’t handle emergencies. They simply cherry-pick the most profitable procedures and patients, leaving the NHS to handle complex, costly cases. When complications arise, patients are rushed back to NHS hospitals – it’s capitalism at its most cynical: privatising profits while socialising risk.

So when the private hospital sector is said to be ‘helping’ the NHS by carrying out additional healthcare services, it is actually the other way round: the NHS is helping private hospitals. In effect, the NHS is paying private hospitals for the use of otherwise empty beds by NHS patients and paying NHS doctors to treat them, rather than pay the same doctors to do the work in NHS facilities.

Think about the perverse mathematics at play here: each NHS doctor diverted to private practice leaves a gap in NHS care. When GPs funnel patients to private providers, they’re not eliminating waiting lists – they’re merely shuffling them around while feeding an industry that profits from the NHS’s manufactured scarcity. It’s a calculated spiral: longer NHS waiting times drive more patients to private care, which pulls more doctors away from NHS work, which further lengthens waiting times. This isn’t a solution to the crisis; it’s a business model built on perpetuating it. Labour’s £20 referral incentive isn’t breaking this cycle – it’s institutionalising it, using public money to accelerate the very problem it claims to solve.

Adding insult to injury…This transformation isn’t just damaging the NHS – it’s gutting it from within. Under Blair’s “payment by results” system, hospitals are funded based on the treatments they provide. When wealthy patients opt for private care, NHS hospitals lose vital funding. The vicious cycle is devastatingly simple: reduced funding leads to longer waiting lists, driving more patients to private care, further depleting NHS resources. Meanwhile, private providers cream off the easy cases while leaving the NHS to handle the complex, expensive treatments their business model can’t profit from.

The cruel irony cuts deep: even the wealthy can’t entirely escape the NHS neither can the rest of us. When heart attacks strike or cancer requires complex treatment, private hospitals shuttle patients to NHS facilities. Yet Labour’s policies accelerate this creation of a two-tier system where the NHS becomes a safety net for private healthcare’s rejects – the patients deemed too costly or complicated for profit-driven care.

After 14 years of Tory devastation and austerity, the NHS needs massive investment in public healthcare, not schemes that funnel taxpayer money to private providers. We need more NHS facilities, more training programs, more staff – and crucially, a functioning social care system to end bed blocking. Yet we’re told to wait until 2028 for Streeting’s viable plan. It begs the question: what exactly was Labour doing in opposition if not planning for real change?

When Bevan founded the NHS in 1948, he famously “stuffed doctors’ mouths with gold” to win their support, allowing consultants to see private patients alongside NHS work. But today’s reality is stark: every hour your NHS doctor spends operating in a private hospital is an hour stolen from public healthcare. Every nurse recruited by a private provider is one fewer caring for NHS patients.

The choice before us isn’t between public and private healthcare – it’s between preserving a universal system that serves everyone equally and surrendering to a fragmented market where care depends on wealth. Every pound diverted to private providers is a pound taken from the NHS, every patient redirected to private care weakens the system that serves us all.

The NHS isn’t failing; it’s being failed. Failed by deliberate underfunding, failed by stealth privatisation, and now failed by those claiming to be its defenders while facilitating its demise. If we want to save it, we must demand more than hollow promises and private sector schemes. We need a genuine commitment to public healthcare – one that puts patients before profits and public service before private gain.

Because once the NHS is fully marketised, there’s no going back. And that’s exactly what some are counting on.

Paul Knaggs