‘Stop outsourcing’

Unite delegate Bridie McCreesh spoke in support of a motion on subsidiary companies and outsourcing in the NHS on Tuesday (September 30).

Drawing on her background as a local authority worker in Northern Ireland, she spoke of the outsourcing threats she and colleagues at a nearby hospital are both facing.

She was unequivocal that the “drive to introduce [subsidiary companies] into the NHS and local authorities must stop”. 

She called these subsidiary companies, also known as ‘SubCos’ “part of the same failed ideas that have driven our public services to crisis over the past decade: cuts to services, pay attacks, and disastrous outsourcing”.

She reminded conference delegates that Labour has “promised the biggest wave of insourcing in a generation”.

“Yet more outsourcing through subsidiary companies risks the opposite,” she warned, saying that in effect they were ‘privatisation by the back door’.

“They hit the lowest-paid staff hardest, break up national pay and conditions, and do nothing for services—whatever the hollow assurances at launch,” Bridie noted. “We know this because we’ve fought it.”

Bridie went on to highlight Unite’s many insourcing wins, including strikes and campaigns that all brought back in house Serco workers at Barts hospital, workers at 2Gether in Kent, and housing repair workers at Stoke-on-Trent.

Unite also defeated SubCo plans at Frimley and many other trusts and councils.

“And we will do it again,” Bridie asserted. “In Northern Ireland this year public sector workers took strike action to defend our services from underfunding and neglect.”

While she welcomed an announcement this week from the NHS in England, which changes the national guidance on subsidiary companies, she said the change was “not enough”.

“We don’t want a pause—we want an end,” Bridie added. “We want existing SubCos brought back in house. Public service workers have had enough.

“Stop outsourcing,” she concluded to applause.

By Hajera Blagg

Photo by Mark Thomas