144th ANNUAL TRADES UNION CONGRESS ………………………….. Held at: The Brighton Centre, Brighton on Sunday, 9th September 2012 Monday, 10th September 2012 Tuesday, 11th September 2012 and Wednesday, 12th September 2012 ………………………. Congress President: PAUL KENNY ……………………….. PROCEEDINGS – DAY TWO (Monday, 10th September 2012) ………………………. Conference reported by: Marten Walsh Cherer Ltd., 1st Floor, Quality House, 6-9 Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1HP. email: [email protected] ………………………….. 1 SECOND DAY: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 MORNING SESSION (Congress assembled at 9.35 a.m.) The President: Morning, colleagues. I will try again, morning colleagues. (Good morning!) Morning, Congress. Many thanks. Sorry for the belated thanks to The Tradlads who entertained you while we were delayed. Best wishes and thanks to them. (Applause) They are backstage. I have a few announcements. Delegates, in a change to the published business I will now be taking Motion 5 in the name of the POA on Tuesday afternoon as business allows. The video presentation on London 2012 will be taken at the close of this morning’s session. Delegates, we start today by returning to Chapter 4 of the General Council Report, Economic and Industrial Affairs, from page 76. I will be calling Composite Motion 13, the NHS. The General Council support the composite motion. Fire away. Economic and Industrial Affairs The NHS Jim Fahie (Chartered Society of Physiotherapy) moved Composite Motion 13. 2 He said: Thank you, President, Congress. The Health & Social Care Act, misconceived, complicated, expensive, utterly unwanted, and without a mandate yet it was pushed through parliament in March and now we have to deal with the consequences. It is a tsunami of bureaucracy, a myriad of conflicting policies with the focus away from patient care and onto the competitive market, all at a time when health staff are struggling to meet patient needs due to financial constraints. This is not political point scoring. Health workers are deeply and genuinely upset by cuts that are impacting on patient care. Let’s not forget the end game here, turning the NHS into a US-style insurance based system where your personal wealth decides the care that you receive. Some argue for such a system because the NHS is broken, a child of its time. I tell you as a health worker the NHS is not broken. (Applause) I would also add that people in positions of influence are doing the country no favours by talking the NHS down. I have worked in the US system. I worked in Chicago. I have seen firsthand how it lets patients down. I had an amputee who was refused the opportunity to walk again because his insurance company disputed his level of cover. Six months later they decided he was covered. It was too late. He had contractures that were irreversible. Rationing of treatments, debates over the merit of top-up charges in the NHS, they are chipping away from the NHS which is free at the point of need, as is giving hospitals the freedom to turn up to 49% of their business into private care. Another form of competition in health in its early days is any qualified provider. It is already reducing patient access to physiotherapy and it has also removed the patient’s choice to refer themselves for physiotherapy. Yet there remains strong public support for our NHS. 3 You just need to look at the reaction to the Olympics opening ceremony to see that. I am proud of the CSP members who took part in that ceremony. I am also proud of the hundreds of physios who volunteered through both Games. I will give a few examples of what can happen if you do not get the care you need. When you have a stroke it does turn your life upside down. You will not know how important the NHS is to your care and to your injury, and to the rest of your life, until you do not get your rehab. When you are off work after an accident, if you do not access your rehab early enough you may never return to work. Trade unions and the TUC have such an important role in describing the value of NHS services in ways that can resonate. The NHS is not perfect; it has to continually look at how it can improve. I work in the NHS and it is proven to be one of the fairest, most cost-efficient and effective healthcare systems in the world. Why else does this Government want to talk about exporting the NHS brand overseas? With the Health and Social Care Act a reality, NHS staff must be at the heart of the new commissioning arrangements, they must be at the heart of local campaigning to protect our NHS services where all else fails. They must be recognised for the valuable work they do, recognised for professional autonomy, and allowed to develop their skills for the benefit of our patients. Congress, never again must this NHS be subjected to the turmoil of this kind of morale sapping, money wasting reorganisation that is the Health and Social Care Act. I move. (Applause) Roz Norman (UNISON) seconded Composite Motion 13. 4 She said: Congress, as the composite points out, the NHS has been left reeling by the cuts, fragmentation, and privatisation that this Government is attempting to force upon the services, the patients, and the staff. Remember, Congress, this is not an NHS that was failing, in fact quite the opposite. It is the most equitable health service in the world and, crucially, the most efficient. If there was any doubt about the esteem in which the NHS was held you need to look no further than the wonderful Olympic opening ceremony. Only a country such as ours with the NHS will choose to celebrate the health service while the eyes of the world are watching us. It is something we are rightly proud of. Of course, it was deeply ironic that the ceremony took place against a backdrop of the massive unnecessary structural reorganisation which is sapping the morale out of the people that serve it and the people that Danny Boyle wanted to celebrate. The Health and Social Care Act represents the single most damaging piece of legislation ever aimed at the NHS by a government. It is quite open in its plans. It wants to break up a nationalised service into little pieces, ripe for plunder by the Tories and their private healthcare industry. The cost in human terms will be immense: for NHS patients they will find themselves waiting in longer queues; for the public they will find services cut and reduced; and for staff they will find that their terms and conditions of employment have been eroded away, that is if they still have a job and not one of the thousands that have been made redundant. On the subject of job losses, I suspect that no one in this room will have shed too many tears last week when Andrew Lansley was finally booted out of his office of 5 Health Secretary. (Applause) Unfortunately, Congress, there are two big problems with this: firstly, Lansley should have been booted out of his post years ago so that the Social Act would have been taken out and scrapped; secondly, Lansley’s replacement, Jeremy Hunt. Oh dear. Clearly, even Lansley was not sufficiently in the pockets of the private interest so Murdoch Medicines here we come, or even Virgin Care here we come. Virgin has recently been given a five-year contract to run seven hospitals. It is almost as if Cameron looked round the Cabinet table and tried to pick someone worse than Lansley: Michael Gove was not available so we chose Hunt. This is a man who apparently subscribes to the Tory notion that the NHS is a 64-year mistake. He co- authored a pamphlet calling for the denationalisation of the NHS and he tried to stop Danny Boyle from celebrating the NHS at the Olympics. Congress, it is not all doom and gloom. The unions working together with the TUC and various charities, campaigners and patient groups, fought hard. We will continue to fight. This is our watch. We must defend the NHS. Please support. (Applause) Stephen Heard (FDA) supported Composite Motion 13. He said: This is my first time at Congress so go easy on me. I am from MIP, the FDA section for healthcare and managers. We have a new Secretary of State who has taken ministerial responsibility for delivery of the greatest Olympics in history. May I remind him that the success of these Games was very much due to the team work of the backroom staff and volunteers, as well as the athletes. It is a bit like the NHS, which is not just about the clinicians but also about the staff, managers, and volunteers as the frontline clinical team cannot get medals and accolades for their 6 performance without the support of those behind the scenes. It is the whole healthcare team who keep the NHS show on the road. There has been much talk about Team GB but what about Team NHS and the everyday medal winning performances of all staff regardless of where they are in the process? They are the greatest asset of the NHS and work tirelessly in an increasing challenging environment. It is no surprise that it took centre stage at the Olympic opening ceremony. We now have a new Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt (spelt with an “H”) who describes leading a campaign to save Royal Surrey NHS as his proudest achievement. Let’s hope for more proud moments.