How the BBC betrayed the NHS

In his  chapter for this book ,Meirion Jones writes: “Take the junior doctors’ strike this month. Newsnight, to its credit, ran a MORI poll showing 66% public in favour, 18% against. But on the day of the action Today trawled for anti-strike patients, and the BBC News at Ten ran two negative voices from ordinary people, and no-one in favour.”

For anyone disappointed by the Beeb’s coverage of the ongoing junior doctors fiasco, it’s worth remembering they have serious form here.

The BBC’s woeful reporting of the Coalition’s Health and Social Care Act in 2012 looked bad when I wrote the report, How the BBC betrayed the NHS  in September 2012.90 It now looks much, much worse. Because what has now unfolded puts to rest any lingering doubts as to the nature of the changes the Tories have inflicted on Britain’s most loved institution. This was a coup. And the BBC connived, however unwittingly, in its execution.

As the bill moved through parliament, the BBC repeatedly trotted out highly dubious government spin as fact, culminating tragically with its headline on the day it became law: ‘Bill which gives power to GPs passes’. How have GPs reacted to this empowerment? Just two years after the bill passing, polling of GPs by the BMA found 74% of GPs reporting unmanageable or unsustainable workloads. Less than one in ten said they felt their morale was ‘high’ and not a single GP said it was ‘very high’.91

On the detail of the GP commissioning, my report cited the following as one of the scores of stories the BBC ignored:

at least half and sometimes all of the GPs that dominate [commissioning] boards have a personal financial interest in a private or other non-NHS provider. (False Economy, reported in the Guardian)92

This car crash in waiting duly came to fruition. By November 2015, £2.4bn of taxpayers’ money had already been handed out to providers owned by the very GPs responsible for commissioning care.93 But this is just a small part of the story. The actual business of commissioning, as I and otherswarned at the time,94was destined to be run long-term by major firms, because doctors are not accountants – they’re doctors:

Yes, most of the NHS budget was handed to GPs. But they are now handing it over to private firms. It’s phase two of the privatisation project … As the Observer reveals this morning,95 the list of approved suppliers … is dominated by management consultancies, outsourcing giant, Capita, and US health insurer, UnitedHealth, the previous employer of NHS CEO, Simon Stevens.96

Again, as I and others suggested,97Lansley has indeed gone on to take up lucrative roles in the private health sector. In November we learned that he had taken on another three paid roles, including with a drugs company and a private equity firm with substantial health interests.98

Many of us warned that Lansley’s bill represented the destruction of the NHS as a nationalised service and the beginning of its life as a fully fledged market.

All the facts pointed to this. But beyond the Guardian and Channel 4, mainstream opposition in the media was limited, with some honourable exceptions. Opposition instead mainly came from small independent sites like openDemocracy,Social Investigations and False Economy, campaigners like 38 Degrees and NHS Support Federation, and academics like Allyson Pollock, Colin Leys, Lucy Reynolds, and many more. The end result was a clear divide between social and traditional media; they were worlds apart. Social media was seething with anger while the BBC calmly invited four pro-bill voices to discuss the issue on the radio.

The BBC was not the only offender, that’s true, but it was one of the worst. Even the Mail, and arguably the Telegraph, were more critical of the bill than the BBC. I examined the coverage of the press in general for Tallis and Davis’ 2013 book, NHS SOS.99But regardless, the Beeb is a unique institution and should be held to standards befitting of that status – and that funding.

Now, we have unfortunately been proved correct. In April 2015, data for the past year showed a 500% increase in the value of NHS contracts won by the private sector. Since 2010, the report continued, the private sector has won 60% of contracts. Of the thirteen ‘super contracts’ over £100m handed out that year: “the private sector companies won six, five were won by consortia containing both non-NHS and NHS organisations, but only two were won by NHS organisations working alone” (Paul Evans, NHS Support Federation).100

So what sort of firms are now providing ‘NHS’ care? Well, a full half of them have links to the

Conservative party.101 Indeed, by February 2014 Tory donors had already won £1.5bn of NHS contracts.102 It’s almost as if there might be selfish motives for health industry figures to donate to the Tory party, yet no one at the BBC thought it was a story during the passage of the bill: its online news gave just 21 words to the subject. In total.103 No clip of it being covered by either BBC radio or TV has yet emerged.

Many, like Branson’s Virgin Care, seem to be making very efficient use of tax havens104 -something you’d think the government might try to clamp down on, given that it is public taxation funding these contracts. This crucial part of the equation is something the Treasury continues to dodge when assessing sell-offs: when privatising any state asset it should be taken for granted that its new owners will pay little or no tax, shrinking the tax base further. In the case of PFI the Treasury assumed these firms would pay a ludicrous 25% of profits back in corporation tax. Many were moved offshore,105with one HSBC wheeze paying just 0.3% tax.

Nor are contracts limited to health companies. The public has now been treated to the prospect of £1bn worth of NHS services being provided by Lockheed Martin, the well known

US arms dealer.106This is what a health market looks like, and it’s a little different from the ‘local family doctors’ narrative that the government pushed and the BBC parroted.

In one of the most sordid moves to date, the Conservatives flogged the nation’s blood plasma supplier to Mitt Romney’s private equity firm.107This is important, because our plasma supplies were effectively nationalised precisely because the market is a poor deliverer: maximising profits means paying donors the minimum possible, which in practice tends to mean setting up shop in run down areas of deprivation with high rates of disease and drug addiction. What is now abundantly clear is that for the Conservatives it is profit rather than your health that is the driving force behind our healthcare system.

The BBC seemed to swallow the government’s spin that if an NHS service was provided by, say, Serco, that was not ‘privatisation’. The World Health Organisation disagreed, it defines health privatisation as “A process in which non-governmental actors become increasingly involved in the financing and/or provision of healthcare services” [my emphasis]. It would be nice to think the BBC would side with the WTO (and health campaigners across the country) over the likes of Andrew Lansley and his spin team, but alas. What’s becoming clear now, however, is that it is also the financing of healthcare that is destined to be privatised: the Conservative government, just months after being elected last year, began its formal inquiry into charges and insurance-based care.108

“I don’t know how much any of you realise that with the Lansley act we pretty much gave away control of the NHS” (Jane Ellison, public health minister).109

Ellison makes no mention of GPs, the people we were told they were handing that control to.

That’s probably because they are of increasing irrelevance to the Conservatives: only 1 in 5 GP practices think they will still be around in 10 years time.11085% think they will have been fully privatised by then. If you recall, this was the health bill which in the words of the BBC “gives power to GPs”. It gives power to multinational health corporations, accountants, lawyers and Tory donors, that is the reality.

My 2012 report caused a modest stir. The BBC issued an initial response that was both weak and unsuited to the proportions of the charges made. Encouraged by openDemocracy chair David Elstein, they came back with a fuller response shortly after – not a single point of substance was refuted:

For example, Oliver Huitson states that the BBC did not report a British Medical Association denunciation of the changes on 1st March 2012 but ignores the fact that we have reported the concerns of the BMA, alongside those of the Royal College of Nursing and Unison, on a regular basis for the past 18 months. He also suggests that the BBC ignored evidence of privatisation but doesn’t take into account a significant amount of coverage on this, including articles about Circle and Hinchingbrooke, the extent of private sector involvement under patient choice and the extension of that into community services. (Director of news Helen Boaden)

In other words, ‘yes, we ignored all the specific stories and revelations in question but we did include other things in these broad areas’. It was an 8,000 word report. That’s quite a lot to miss. The phrase “private sector involvement” was typical of the BBC’s lack of clarity. In practice it means “large chunks of the NHS are being given to private firms”.

Nevertheless, I said I was happy to look at TV and radio and the BBC duly gave me some links to what they felt was their hardest hitting material. Disappointing doesn’t begin to describe it. Not a single specific omission from the report was covered in these clips, so the argument that the problems were only in the online material looks increasingly weak. But more importantly some of the material the BBC sent to me was so questionable that I was puzzled they had even volunteered it for consideration. To take just one example (and bear in mind, tragically, this is from a collection the BBC hand picked as a rebuttal to the 2012 report), they sent a clip from the Today programme, in which a Royal College of Nursing (RCN) representative is interviewed:

RCN: [the bill is being put into practice before being signed off by parliament, the bill is a distraction.]

BBC: “…would it be more of a distraction stopping now? It’s going to cause more chaos… if you stop the reorganisation you’re not going to shorten waiting lists are you… it’s a management distraction, not a doctors distraction… I don’t really see how you save waiting times in casualty by Andrew Lansley changing their minds about what they spend their time on.”

RCN: [Disagrees. Mentions the cap on private treatment is being raised to 49%]

BBC: “Ah, doesn’t this get to the heart of it, in any industry the people who work in the industry don’t like competition, and basically these reforms are about competition…

RCN: “You have a situation recently where an NHS hospital in London has sued the strategic health authority in London for a million pounds and we understand there’s an appeal against that.”

The legal action the RCN cite was not something reported by the BBC despite their being informed of it in one of their own interviews, and it was reported elsewhere. Interesting too that the bill has gone from being primarily about “giving power to GPs” to being “basically… about competition”. No clip has yet been found of the BBC pressing Andrew Lansley on what the “heart” of his bill was really about. The toughest questions seem reserved for nurse’s representatives, who are accused of causing “chaos” and simply being scared of competition.

I had started to write a full follow up analysing all the clips the Beeb sent; I gave up in theend because there was so little to say. It merely confirmed what I and many who had readthe report suspected: there was no great difference between BBC’s TV and radio coverageand BBC Online’s output when it came to reporting on the health reforms. Why would therebe? BBC News and Online are run from the same newsroom. Of course, the inclusion ofradio and TV guests gives more room to a wider breadth of opinion and argument, but thebig stories were still left uncovered.

Even if the broadcast material had been heavy hitting and fearless (just entertain this fictionfor a moment), that still leaves BBC Online guilty of a profound failure on a critical public

111And it’s publiclyfunded. That scenario alone should have resulted in a formal inquiry by the BBC.

A senior BBC presenter did tell me, some months later, that the 2012 report had beencirculated and read ‘right to the top’. But what was really needed was a full and open inquiryinto how well the BBC’s coverage of the bill reflected the realities of the legislation beingpassed. I would hope that now, with the benefit of hindsight, even the BBC would concedethat serious errors were made. But it’s not clear that all that much has changed.

The following was cited in a blog from November 2014,112talking about how the BBC endeda segment on the speech of 92 year old Harry Leslie Smith, and his fears for the NHS underConservative control. They didn’t ‘balance’ Smith’s opinion with government opinion, theybalanced it with government spin dressed as fact.

“Both [the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats] are committed to the founding values of the NHS that no one, regardless of income, should be deprived of the best care”. (BBC)

Now, this is untrue, the H&SC Act quite explicitly ends the notion that all care is open toanyone, for free. This is spin, and it flies in the face of observable reality. It should bereported as government claims, not a factual account. The statement “… no one, regardlessof income, should be deprived of the best care” is word for word identical to a speech byJeremy Hunt the year before.

The problem is compounded in the same piece by claiming the Coalition had “increasedNHS spending”. They had initially pledged to increase real terms NHS spending, a pledgethey broke. As the BBC understands perfectly well, real terms spending is the only figurethat matters, and it is real terms spending that the government claimed would increase.

In July last year I found on my TV screen the most bizarre program about ‘extremecouponing’. Set in the US, one lady in a supermarket bought 260 toilet rolls, 125 sportsdrinks, and various other absurdities. The 5 trolleys of goods came to $700, reduced to $96because she had a small mountain of coupons. Now, the dietary shortcomings of this sports

drink diet are by the by, the point is the reason she was doing it: to pay her medical bills.

That’s where we’re headed. And the tragedy is that all this was predicted, with greataccuracy, by so many people – but not the BBC. It looked like a stitch up, it walked like astitch up, it stank like a stitch up – and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what it was.

What is desired from the BBC on this issue is the same now as it has always been: tochallenge and investigate power rather than to amplify it. They failed on the Lansley bill, andthat failure makes it harder for them to maintain the levels of public support needed for theirown survival. It was a strategic misjudgement. There is only one major nationalised entity leftfor the Tories to sell: the BBC.

Oliver Huitson is Head of Communications at Labour Leave. He was formerly co-editor of openDemocracyUK, and has written for publications including the Guardian, the BBC, VICE, and the New Statesman.

This article is taken from:

Read Rethinking the BBC

Public Media in the 21st Century

Edited by Niki Seth-Smith, Jamie Mackay and Dan Hind