Former Labour health secretary Frank Dobson today attacked government claims that the private sector has played a significant part in delivering NHS targets.
Mr Dobson addressed a lunchtime anti-privatisation rally at the Unison conference in Gateshead to attack "misleading claims made from the prime minister down" about the role private companies have played in achieving NHS targets.
"If you listen to them you would think the public sector had achieved the cuts and waiting lists and waiting times and they claimed recently that the NHS target of a maximum three month for a cataract operation had been achieved even earlier," he said.
In the past two years, the NHS had delivered 300,000 operations, while the private sector company had added just 20,000 to the tally, said Mr Dobson. "Now who was it reduced the waiting lists, who was it reducing the waiting times? I put it to you that it was not the private sector."
A throng of Unison activists heard Mr Dobson defend public sector workers in the build up to health secretary Patricia Hewitt's keynote speech to the Unison conference this afternoon.
Rumours that angry members planned to storm the platform prompted Unison's leader, Dave Prentis, earlier today to urge delegates to "listen and engage" with what she had to say, as he gave his word to activists that the union would follow members on industrial action over job cuts and privatisation.
Mr Dobson, whose wife has just spent 10 days in a Yorkshire hospital, attacked the government's decision to introduce markets to the NHS.
He recalled a radio interview with a government health expert who admitted that the new NHS finance system, payment by results, was a deliberate "subplot" to "destabilise" the NHS. "It is not an accident, it is not a big pretence, it is deliberate," he said.
Despite claims that the private sector was "more efficient and cheaper", private companies earned 11% more than the NHS for delivering the same services, Mr Dobson said.
"Money is being gobbled up by paperwork. It used to be a proud claim that only 4p in the pound was spent on paperwork in the NHS - that has now gone up to 15p."
Mr Dobson complained that NHS trusts were employing customer relations advisers to "drum up trade".
He added: "We are seeing medical doctors being sacked and spin doctors being recruited."
