‘The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed the inadequacies of health and social care provision in this country’

• I SHARE the dismay of many readers and residents at the takeover by business corporations of local GP services.

But we should be objecting to more than just profiteering at the expense of taxpayers, patients and health service workers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed the inadequacies of health and social care provision in this country.

These failings are the results of years of underinvestment in those services by the present government and its predecessors.

That underinvestment urgently needs to be reversed if the country is to recover effectively from the pandemic.

The government would like us to believe that contracting out health services to the private sector can be an economical substitute for such investment.

But while governments may be held accountable for such investment to parliament and ultimately the electorate, the private sector has no such accountability, except to its shareholders, and then only in respect of the profits that companies earn.

Privatisation should not be allowed to become a substitute for the public investment that we need. The economies obtained through contracting out public services to the private sector are gained at the cost of democratic accountability.

JAN TOPOROWSKI
Mall Studios, Tasker Road, NW3