Nurses for Reform and David Cameron: the unanswered questions

By Tom Harris MP / @TomHarrisMP

Last month, David Cameron spent an hour ensconced in a private meeting in his House of Commons office with Dr Helen Evans.

Dr Evans is the director of a right-wing libertarian “think tank” called Nurses for Reform, which, according to its website:

“believes that the government should re-cast the NHS as simply a funder of last resort alongside an insurance and self-funder based market. It believes that the state should set free – through a range of full blown for and not-for-profit privatisations – all NHS hospitals and healthcare provision.”

Following the meeting with Cameron, Dr Evans said:

“I had been invited by him to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and presented a range of ideas. Amongst others, these included the end of national collective pay bargaining for nurses and doctors, the view that the state should not own or have any of its agents manage hospitals, a world of widespread health advertising (to overcome problems of patient ignorance through trusted brands) and a dramatic liberalisation of hospital planning laws. On this latter point, central government should have no say in when and where any hospital is opened or closed.”

“If he becomes Prime Minister I have no doubt NFR will meet with him and his policy team again.”

I share her confidence. If he becomes Prime Minister.

No doubt the Tory Party will claim that, as an aspiring PM, Cameron has to meet a whole range of opinion formers and interest groups across the NHS. Yet he has consistently stated that his party has changed, that it is no longer antipathetic to the NHS. “We’ll cut the deficit but not the NHS,” he told us, unconvincingly, this week.

So if his party really is committed to the values of the NHS, if he really has distanced himself from the cranks in his ranks who describe the NHS as “a 60-year mistake“, why on earth is he even meeting a group that advocates large-scale privatisation of the NHS? An organisation which criticises the American healthcare system for being “a highly planned, regulated and government funded system.”

Interestingly, there is no mention on the NFR website of the presence of Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley at the meeting. Did Cameron take the meeting on his own, and if so, why?

And please take a look at the links section on the NFR website. There you’ll find links to all sorts of NHS-friendly organiations such as The Adam Smith Institute, the Libertarian Alliance and (inevitably) the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Dr Evans expounds her views over at the Adam Smith Institute site, in an article entitled “The micro-politics of hospital privatisation”, in which she calls for the NHS to be renamed the “National Health SYSTEM” (her capitalisation).

So what role will the NFR have on Conservative health policy if the Tories form the next government? Dr Evans seems to think that, following her meeting with the Tory leader, there will be some kind of role for her organisation.

I think we should be told.

And I think we should be concerned.