Virgin Care and other private companies seize another £3.1 billion of NHS assets
By
Ajanta Silva
15 January 2018
With a £101 billion ($US 137 billion) budget in the National Health Service (NHS) in England alone, private companies have found a gold mine to plunder with the blessings of the Tory government.
A recent report by the campaign group NHS Support Federation brings to light the aggressive involvement of the private companies in winning contracts previously run by in-house NHS providers. Private, for-profit companies won more than £3.1 billion worth of contracts in the last financial year, 2016-2017, with Virgin Care—run by billionaire business mogul Richard Branson—becoming the main beneficiary.
Over the last four years, the Federation has compiled and analysed publicly available data on how the contracts were awarded.
The Federation states, “Virgin care is now the dominant private provider in the NHS market—winning a third of the total value of contracts won by non-NHS providers over the last year. The number of services the company provides to the NHS has risen from 230 to 400 over last 12 months, according to its website.”
Virgin Care is a subsidiary of Virgin Group holdings Ltd, which is based in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. The company is aggressively fighting to establish a foothold in NHS-run services, although it claims it has made losses over the last several years and paid no tax in the UK.
Care UK reaped the second-largest share of the contracts last year, worth £596.3 million.
Private companies are exploiting the favourable conditions created for this plunder under the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, brought in by their political paymasters in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government. This Act made it mandatory for…