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Stop Ambulance Privatisation

Posted by Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton, at 09:17, Mon 3 December 2012:

The privatised gas and electricity companies are busy exploiting the consumer, the privatised railways are in a state of chaos and as a Member of Parliament my mailbag overflows with complaints about the de-regulated privatised bus service. I very occasionally get complaints about the non emergency ambulance service in Greater Manchester. Of course the ambulance service like any other organisation staffed with human beings can always be improved, but only a craven, perverse government could believe that putting a private bus operator in charge of ambulance services was a good idea, for this is what has happened. Arriva, one of the five major bus operators in this country, has been given the contract to run ambulances in Greater Manchester. Unison, the Trade Union that represents the staff currently employed to run the ambulance service in Greater Manchester, said ‘it is a disgrace that the winning bidder was not the provider with the highest standards just the lowest costs...we don’t want patients in Manchester to suffer because of this decision’. Neither do I. One parent, whose daughter suffers from Costello Syndrome a degenerative disease, is worried that Arriva might not have as highly trained people and she wanted to feel confident that if they had a problem on the way, they could save her daughter’s life. Not only are our bus services unreliable when provided by private bus companies we already know that Arriva are pretty useless at running ambulance transport services. I am not surprised. Arriva, who run the Leicestershire ambulance service, were inspected by the Care and Quality Commission a couple of months ago and found not to be meeting standards in staffing, cleanliness, infection control, safeguarding people who use services from abuse, care and welfare of people who use services, assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision. I do not want patients and constituents in Greater Manchester to suffer in the same way as people in Leicestershire have done. I am supporting Unison’s campaign to prevent the privatisation of Greater Manchester’s ambulance service and I have signed a petition, which can be found at; http://www.savemanchesterpatienttransport.org.uk/petition/ I hope you will join the campaign and sign the petition. Together with Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, we will do everything we can to stop this ‘a privatisation too far’ before the deadline of next March.