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This is not about efficiency or patient choice. It is about transferring public money to private shareholders while the service crumbles. The evidence that privatisation improves NHS performance is non-existent. The evidence that it harms patients, staff, and the public finances is overwhelming.

Reversing privatisation is possible. Other countries have done it. Scotland shows it can work within the UK. The barrier is not economic or practical. It is political—the refusal of both major parties to admit that decades of policy have been wrong and to confront the corporate interests profiting from NHS decline.

The NHS is not being killed by underfunding alone. It is being killed by design, through a deliberate process of privatisation that transfers wealth from the public to private shareholders while patients wait and staff despair. We are pretending not to notice. But the evidence is there, and it is damning.

Key takeaways

• Private sector provision of NHS services has grown from £3.1 billion in 2006 to over £30 billion in 2024 according to the NHS Confederation
• Waiting lists have reached 7.8 million despite increased private sector involvement, undermining claims that privatisation improves efficiency
• Private providers cherry-pick profitable routine procedures while complex cases remain with underfunded NHS hospitals
• Staff are being transferred from NHS to private providers on worse terms, fragmenting the workforce and reducing training capacity
• Countries with fully public systems like Scotland show better outcomes on key metrics despite lower private sector involvement

Sources

• NHS Confederation — Private sector provision data
• The King's Fund — NHS performance and reform analysis
• British Medical Association — Workforce and privatisation research
• Nuffield Trust — Healthcare policy and data

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