Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

MONDAY, 14 APRIL 2014

Every major chunk of your NHS offered to Private Health listed here. A massive £15 billion quid's worth.................................

http://www.greenbenchesuk.com/

One of the big changes in hospital care is the number of day procedures such as hernia. These used to require a stay and now patients go home afterwards. The UK is a leader in such treatments and this would reduce the need for beds.

Well ask yourself Cyners where is the NHS going when the government is syphoning it all off to their mates??????.

What will it be like in 5 years time if this rate of sell off above in the drop down list carrys on.

Dont listen to Hays he wants an economy based on pure capitalism not responsible capitalism.

sticky .....
what is the total nhs budget?
it may well be that nhs gets good value for money having tendered out these procedures ...... for all sorts of reasons .... do you have proof to the contrary, or are you just on one of your customary "bashing crusades"?

you also seem to glibly assume that the top consultants etc would like to work in nhs full time (or at all), which of course is not the case and for all sorts of reasons

Cyners go on the list and scroll to the right, it gives you the details of the contract.

And yes I dont want the NHS sold off to third partys who can hold the government to ransom.

Lets face it does this government have a good record with third partys eg ATOS etc etc.

I dont think so.

And if top consultants dont want to work for the NHS I can tell you now they can go F off, theirs plenty to take their places.

DWP Block Report To Cover Up Work Programme Shambles
Posted on April 16, 2014 by johnny void

IDS-slugThe DWP are refusing to release an evaluation of the floundering £6 billion pound Work Programme despite the report having recently featured on Channel 4 news.

The evaluation is believed to be critical of the Work Programme and in particular benefit sanctions, warning that they found: “no conclusive evidence that sanctions were changing job search behaviour or increasing job entry rates.”

A Freedom of Information request asking to see the report has today been refused by the DWP on the grounds that they plan to publish it at an unspecified later date (PDF). The evaluation was scheduled to be released in the Summer of last year.

This is not the first time the DWP have treated Freedom of Information (FOI) rules with contempt in a shoddy effort to conceal what’s really going on, and wrong, with the department. A ruling by the Information Commissioner;s Office (ICO) ordering the release of the names of charities benefiting from free labour under the Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) scheme has been completely ignored. A second ICO ruling (PDF) ordering the DWP to confirm whether a charity was involved in workfare was issued last month, and has so far been snubbed. The DWP were found in breach of the FOI again (PDF) at the end of last month when they were slammed in a ruling for not taking the reasonable steps required to clarify another request relating to Mandatory Work Activity.

The DWP have claimed that if the public were allowed to know who is using workfare then the scheme might collapse. They pretend this would stop people benefiting from the ‘disciplines’ that workfare offers and may even harm the economy. After all, if people knew that household names such as The Salvation Army, the YMCA, Groundwork and The Conservation Volunteers were all forcing people to work without pay then they might decide these charities were a bunch of wankers and never give them a penny again.

There is no such excuse for refusing to release an evaluation into the Work Programme however – a report produced with our money. The only person likely to look like a wanker if people see this document is Iain Duncan Smith himself who is still pretending how wonderful the Work Programme is. The Work Programme statistics already show the scheme is a disaster and steadily getting worse. No doubt the DWP hope they can hide just how much of a wanker Iain Duncan Smith actually is until after the next election. But it’s too late. Everybody knows.


Posted on April 16, 2014 by johnny void

sticky .... you didn't answer the key (NHS) questions i asked; you just glided past them as if they were irrelevant, which of course they are not

as for top quality consultants, there patently are NOT a bundle of same just floating about wondering what to do with their time, so don't be so silly

and as i wrote originally, it may well be that NHS not only thinks but is actually getting good value for money for at least a large proportion of the work that is tendered out, and there can be any number of reasons for that
do you have the knowledge to counter that?
of course you don't and indeed you would not be expected to, any more than i do

The problem with I see with private companies running "sections" of the NHS is that they are doing it for profits which could be utilised by the NHS itself rather than into the pockets of "company owners" at the expense of the tax payer and at detriment to other NHS Service.

Also, the biggest sections are being cherry picked.

There is no reason which I can see, why management on publicly owned company should be better or worse than a private company.

But I do see the necessity for some areas of management to have a relatively high number those with a background in Public and Preventative Medicine.


-----------------


The rush to privatising all aspects of "business", tends to be built on false ideology and often in hope of personal gain or advantage.

.

fred - you are not necessarily correct as intimated in my previous post

almost as an aside ...... many if not most consultants split their time between NHS and private - and indeed, why should they not do so
however, from the handful of consultants that i happen to talk to at my golf club - we have many medics there - they are pretty cheesed off with the treatment they get from NHS, and for reasons that sound valid to me

Well tell them to go abroad Cynic.

Plentyfull supply on tap from Asia.

And as for your question on what is the NHS budget......you go find it, why should I do your work for you.

Here is catalogue of officially recognised Tory lies used to justify their unjustifiable policies, which have have resulted in reprimands:

David Cameron rebuked by statistics watchdog over national debt claims - PM said the government was ‘paying down Britain’s debts’ in a political broadcast, even though debt is actually rising.

“Now that his false claims have been exposed, it’s time the prime minister stopped deliberately misleading people about his economic record.”- Rachel Reeves.

Finally Exposed! The Deficit Myth! So, David Cameron When Are You Going to Apologise? David Cameron rebuked over austerity claims - David Cameron has been corrected by the Treasury’s own forecaster over claims that cuts in public spending are not reducing economic growth. The Office for Budget Responsibility told the Prime Minister that it does believe that cutting public spending will reduce economic growth in the short term.

Robert Chote, the head of the OBR, contradicted a claim Mr Cameron made this week in a speech about the economy, in which the Prime Minister said the forecaster does not believe cuts are reducing growth.

In fact, as Mr Chote wrote, the OBR believes that cuts in spending and increases in tax will depress economic activity, meaning lower growth.

OBR head rebukes Osborne: the UK was never at risk of bankruptcy. Office for Budget Responsibility chief Robert Chote dismisses the “danger of insolvency”.

In the weeks after he took office, George Osborne justified his austerity programme by claiming that Britain was on “the brink of bankruptcy”. He told the Conservative conference in October 2010: “The good news is that we are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy.”

It was, of course, nonsense.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham launched a scathing rebuke of the decision to exercise the Government’s veto in a report on the case to Parliament. Blocking the publication of a report into the risks of NHS reforms is a sign that ministers want to downgrade freedom of information laws, a watchdog has warned. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley deployed it to block an Information Tribunal ruling that he should meet Labour demands to disclose the document.

Duncan Smith rebuked by ONS for misuse of benefit statistics - The claim that 8,000 people moved into work as a result of the benefit cap is “unsupported by the official statistics”, says the UK Statistics Authority. In letter to Duncan Smith, Andrew Dilnot writes that “In the manner and form published, the statistics do not comply fully with the principles of the Code of Practice, particularly in respect of accessibility to the sources of data, information about the methodology and quality of the statistics, and the suggestion that the statistics were shared with the media in advance of their publication.”

Another statement by Duncan Smith later in the month also drew criticism and a reprimand . The minister said around 1 million people have been stuck on benefits for at least three of the last four years “despite being judged capable of preparing or looking for work”.

However, the figures cited also included single mothers, people who were seriously ill, and people awaiting testing.

Iain Duncan Smith Rebuked Over Immigration Statistics - Iain Duncan Smith and the Department of Work and Pensions have been accused of publishing misleading immigration figures that were “highly vulnerable to misinterpretation”.Figures showing 371,000 immigrants were on benefits were rushed out by ministers with insufficient regard for “weaknesses” in the data, according to the UK Statistics Authority on Wednesday.

In a strongly-worded rebuke to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, the head of the UKSA, sir Michael Scholar, condemned the handling of the research, the Press Association reported.

Sir Michael said that despite being “highly vulnerable to misinterpretation”, the claims were given to the media without the safeguards demanded for official statistics and by issuing the figures as a “research paper”, the DWP had bypassed the need to meet the usual code of conduct, he noted.

Grant Shapps rebuked by UK Statistics Authority for misrepresenting benefit figures - Yet another Conservative politician is caught making it up. Grant Shapps has joined his fellow Conservatives in the data hall of shame. In March, the Tory chairman claimed that “nearly a million people” (878,300) on incapacity benefit had dropped their claims, rather than face a new medical assessment for its successor, the employment and support allowance. The figures, he said, “demonstrate how the welfare system was broken under Labour and why our reforms are so important”. The claim was faithfully reported by the Sunday Telegraph but as the UK Statistics Authority has now confirmed in its response to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore (see below), it was entirely fabricated.

In his letter to Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, UKSA chair Andrew Dilnot writes that the figure conflated “official statistics relating to new claimants of the ESA with official statistics on recipients of the incapacity benefit (IB) who are being migrated across to the ESA”. Of the 603,600 incapacity benefit claimants referred for reassessment as part of the introduction of the ESA between March 2011 and May 2012, just 19,700 (somewhat short of Shapps’s “nearly a million) abandoned their claims prior to a work capability assessment in the period to May 2012. The figure of 878,300 refers to the total of new claims for the ESA closed before medical assessment from October 2008 to May 2012. Thus, Shapps’s suggestion that the 878,300 were pre-existing claimants, who would rather lose their benefits than be exposed as “scroungers”, was entirely wrong.

As significantly, there is no evidence that those who abandoned their claims did so for the reasons ascribed by Shapps.

The chair of the UK Statistics Authority has rebuked shadow home secretary Chris Grayling - the authority have said he “must take issue” with claims made by the conservatives and warned the way they use violent crime statistics is “likely to mislead the public” and damage public trust. Mr Grayling has used a comparison between figures to suggest that the Labour government has presided over a runaway rise in violent crime. Even colleague Iain Duncan Smith said that such comparisons were “profoundly misleading and London’s Conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, described Grayings’ claim as “absolute nonsense”. Chris Grayling made a headline-grabbing speech in which he likened life in Britain’s inner cities to that in Baltimore, Maryland, as portrayed in the acclaimed television seriesThe Wire. Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, remarked: “The connection between The Wire and Chris Grayling’s grasp on the problems of modern Britain is that they are both fictional.”

Treasury rebuked by UK Statistics Authority for inflation leaks - Britain’s statistics watchdog, ordered the Treasury to review its processes after sensitive inflation data this month was sent to 400 unauthorised people 17 hours before its release. Sir Michael warned: “There is a risk of market manipulation if key economic data fall in to the wrong hands before publication.”

Speculation data was leaking into the market ahead of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announcement has been rife. Market rumours correctly predicted the last two Consumer Price Index inflation releases just before publication – in April and May

UK Statistics rebukes Government over NHS spending claims - David Cameron famously promised he would cut the deficit, not the NHS. We now have it in black and white: he is cutting the NHS, not the deficit. There could be no clearer evidence of the failure of this Prime Minister and his Government.

“For months, David Cameron’s Government have made misleading boasts about NHS spending, misrepresenting the true financial difficulties he has brought upon the NHS. At the same time they have recently begun to try to distance themselves from these problems which David Cameron has created, trying to shift the blame to the NHS and its staff.” – Andy Burnham

The watchdog has called on ministers to correct claims the coalition has made that they increased NHS spending in England. The UK Statistics Authority upheld a complaint by Labour about government claims the NHS budget had increased in real-terms in the past two years.

The watchdog found the best-available Treasury data suggested real-terms health spending was lower in 2011-12 than in 2009-10. The coalition said during its spending review the NHS budget had gone up.

Coalition rebuked again by UK Statistics Authority - this time on flood defence spending. Andrew Dilnot says a Treasury graph on infrastructure left readers with “a false impression of the relative size of investment between sectors”. George Osborne and the Treasury have been reprimanded for misleading people about the government’s investment in infrastructure. For example, their chart made it look like investment in flood defences was roughly the same as in other areas, when in fact it was a tiny fraction.

The UK Statistics Authority has censured the Department for Education -Sir Michael Wilshaw – appointed by Mr Gove as Ofsted chief inspector – for using uncertain, weak and “problematic” statistics to claim that England’s schools have tumbled down the global rankings - the central justification for Goves’ sweeping school reforms. But now the government’s own statistics watchdog has called into question the figures at the heart of the education secretary’s argument. His verdict will be seen by critics as a blow to Mr Gove’s claim that England has “plummeted in the world rankings” given that the education secretary has been so unequivocal about the figures, arguing that “these are facts from which we cannot hide”.

Senior Conservative ministers have been rebuked for attempting to cover up Government statistics - showing one of their key housing policies is not working. In his ruling, seen by The Independent, the Information Commissioner roundly rejected the argument put forward by DCLG officials and demanded that the information be released.

“The exemptions cited by DCLG require more than the possible inconvenience in responding to queries about disclosures,” he wrote scathingly.

“The Commissioner considers that DCLG has not provided arguments which demonstrate that disclosure would inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation.”

He ordered the information be released.

And what did it show? In a short table released to Labour it showed that the number of people who begin self-build homes had fallen since the depths of the recession in 2009 under Labour from 11,800 to 10,400 in 2011.

Oddly the department claimed it did not hold the statistics for 2012 – despite the fact that more than five months had elapsed since the period covered by the data.

Theresa May rebuked over illegally deported asylum seeker - Rare court order calls on home secretary to find and bring back Turkish national and investigate UK Border Agency conduct.

The home secretary has returned to the high court and asked Mr Justice Lloyd Jones to set aside the order. The request was rejected and May now has to ensure the man is brought back to the UK. It is rare for orders to be granted by the court calling for people who have been forcibly removed from the UK to be returned and even rarer for the home secretary not to comply with them.

Mr Justice Singh stated that he was “very concerned” the government had failed to comply with his order.

In the court documents a senior UK Border Agency official admitted: “It is regrettable that the claimant was removed in spite of a court order preventing removal.”

Watchdog reprimands Eric Pickles’ department for £217m overdraft - The National Audit Office finding is embarrassing for communities secretary who was praised by chancellor as ‘model of lean government’ - for his ability to impose cuts on struggling councils – he has been reprimanded by the Whitehall spending watchdog for running up an unauthorised departmental overdraft of £217m. the NAO disclosed that the Treasury had imposed a £20,000 fine on his department as a punishment for its poor financial management.

The head of the civil service officially reprimanded David Cameron over the behaviour of his special advisers - following ‘unacceptable’ briefings to journalists, PR Week has learned. Sir Gus O’Donnell was so alarmed at briefings coming out of Government that he wrote a strongly worded letter to the Prime Minister urging him to restrain his aides.

Prime Minister is rebuked over Liam Fox inquiry, for failing to call in his independent adviser to look at claims that the ministerial code had been breached. Fox resigned after being found guilty of breaching the code in his relations with lobbyist Mr Werritty.

MPs also claim the advisory role itself “lacks independence” after a new candidate was appointed behind closed doors by Mr Cameron.

Finally, Coalition is rebuked by Churches over ‘human cost’ of austerity measures - despite Camerons’ claim that his policies are because of “divine inspiration”.

Servant Voice is an Anagram for Conservative, this pretty much sums up David Cameron's 'leadership'...

sticky .... you're the one who is hopping up and down, not me .....

and if you drag in a load of substandard doctors and consultants - an awful lot of the best in uk are actually indian/asian or similar heritage - you'll be the first to leap about when the treatment they dish out is not as hoped (always assuming they haven't chopped off your leg instead of treating your toenail; suppose you could still hop about)

by the way, good uk consultants have plenty of private work to keep themselves occupied in uk, so no need for them to emigrate

Shortie
That would be because Cameron is the servant of the people.

You mean the servant of his back benches. ...........and Nigel F.

'The People' is a very generalistic term Hays, which people does he serve? Last time I looked it wasn't my people or class.

Ive always said some of the best consultants and doctors in the UK are Indian/Asian heritage.

Cyners your getting your knickers in a twist again.

Im just anti private health and education.

And I dont care how much money a person as it does NOT give them the right to 'que jump' hence my dislike of private health and education.

ps, I notice you use the NHS when its to your advantage, ie, that time you rang NHS direct just to make sure you were ok before you went off on holiday.

there is a diff argument i guess re queue jumping (health) and less tenably private education
that said, i still pay (i don't at my age, but the company still does) for both the NHS and state education, so there is a very valid argument that i am depriving no one at all; indeed very much the opposite

fyi, though i have PPP (for which i pay great sums), i only use private dentistry, which of course is not covered by PPP but which i think is worth every penny

i think i have only claimed on PPP twice - once for a bit of surgery and on another occasion for something more long term (and it was well worth having paid the premium)

=================

by the way, re my NHS visit, as you would have said in other circumstances, "well why the hell shouldn't you? you've been paying for it all your working life"

I have private medical care for my family, I see my local GP and should I require I can get refferred to a private consultant... Your right, it allows me to que jump NHS waiting lists and receive better care and treatments than on the NHS. I see nothing wrong with this, I still contribute to the NHS in the same way any other tax paying person does. Its the lost contributions and the time wasters that pull the service down, this is what going private ultimatly avoids.