Letter to Bob Walter MP (North Dorset)
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your letter about TTIP.
As you point out, there are a lot of carefully phrased statements from the Government and the European Commission that try to convince us that TTIP will not pose a threat to the NHS. Unfortunately, when they are examined in detail, none of them are very reassuring.
They like to say that TTIP won’t force the Government to privatise NHS services. This misses the point. The Government has already privatised and is continuing to privatise NHS services without any help from TTIP. Indeed, many people in the Government would like to go much further. Oliver Letwin, who is now on the team responsible for the Conservative Party’s manifesto, once reportedly told a private meeting that the “NHS will not exist” within five years of a Conservative election victory.
They also like to say that in their opinion there is nothing to fear for the NHS. Well, as long as the Government continues to increase the number of opportunities in the NHS for US investors it won’t have anything to fear from TTIP. The massive danger that TTIP poses to the NHS is that it will give US investors the right to take ‘investor protection’ cases against the Government for unlimited amounts of money if it brings these NHS services back into public ownership. This could make NHS privatisations irreversible.
Finally, they like to say that public services like the NHS will be ‘protected’ in TTIP. In fact, there are a number of possible ‘protections’ that they could be referring to. The problem is that none of them actually protect the NHS from the investor protection cases that we are concerned about. For example, there are:
- Protections that apply to “services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority”. The problem is that this will not apply to NHS services.
- Protections for ‘public services’, ‘public utilities’, or ‘services of general economic interest’ (they are all more or less the same thing). These will apply to NHS services but can only exempt them from certain features of the ‘market access’ obligations and still leaves them exposed to the rest of the deal. So, the Government could still be sued using TTIP for bringing NHS services back into public ownership.
- Annex II reservations, which can be specific to the UK and can drafted by the UK Government. The pro-TTIP lobby like to point to the Annex II reservations in the Canada-EU agreement (CETA) as the model for TTIP, pointing out that they include specific exemptions on healthcare. However, the UK’s Annex II reservations concerning health services in CETA actually make sure that public ambulance services and all secondary care services (i.e. services provided by doctors and nurses in hospitals – public and private) are subject to the agreement.
So to us it looks like the European Commission have been using these technical issues to muddy the waters in a fairly straight forward situation. As it stands NHS service remains within the scope of the deal and subject to many of its obligations – including ‘investor protection’. This is why we have been demanding that David Cameron wields his veto to ensure a really robust carve-out of the agreement for the NHS. If you still do not want to join us in calling on him to do this, we would be very grateful if you would explain why you think it is important to keep the NHS in TTIP.
If you want more details about the legal threats that TTIP poses to the NHS we recommend that you read the legal advice that Unite the Union commissioned from a legal expert in healthcare and EU law. It can be found at: Unite Union Doc.
Yours
Pete Starm
