Oppose further attempts to privatise the NHS

The board of the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which manages Pinderfields, Dewsbury and Pontefract Hospitals, approved plans to create a 'Wholly Owned Subsidiary;' effectively a private company owned by the Trust. Essentially, staff and services currently provided in-house such as, Facilities and Estates, will be 'outsourced' to this new arms-length company in a bid to save money. The Trust claims that money will be saved by exploiting a tax loophole. However, the Trusts CEO has given no guarantees that wages, conditions and pensions of current NHS staff will not be affected and it seems likely that the main savings will come from employing new staff on non-NHS terms and conditions with no access to the NHS Pension Scheme, creating a two-tier workforce. This is a form of backdoor privatisation that will have direct consequences on health workers and could potentially affect patient care and service delivery. Why is it that honest, hard-working people, always seem to pay the price?

NHS Staff are valued members of our community, they are our neighbours, our friends and our colleagues, who dedicate their lives to helping others. After years of increased workloads and understaffing due to Austerity and nurses using foodbanks due to the pay cap, this latest threat to jobs is their 'reward'. The Mid Yorkshire Unison Health Branch is due to ballot their members for Industrial Action in a bid to protect jobs. The Wakefield Constituency Labour Party believe NHS Workers deserve better than this, especially at a time where there is a need for higher wages and better conditions. We will be standing with Unison members in this fight and we would like to call on your support in opposing these plans.