The health service stands on “a financial cliff edge”, with the hospital sector alone predicting a deficit of more than £750m for the current financial year.
That was the grim message rammed home by UNISON at the TUC Congress in Liverpool.
Supporting a composite motion that calls for sustainable funding for the NHS, UNISON delegate Roz Norman added that nearly half of hospitals expected to be in the red in 2014-15.
“As the composite makes clear, funding cuts are biting,” she said.
“Yet this government chose to waste £3bn on a massive top-down reorganisation that no-one voted for and no-one wanted.
“The Lansley-Cameron mess continues to wreak damage and devastation across the country’s most cherished institution.”
She reminded delegates of the millions wasted in “expensive and often botched procurement exercises” – the latest, and largest examples being Cambridgeshire and Staffordshire – and the billions of pounds worth of contracts being offered the private sector.
“These are nakedly driven by ideology, not by what is best for the public purse and certainly not what is best for patients.”
Declaring this to be “crunch time for the NHS in England,” she urged all trade union members to write to their MPs demanding they vote for Clive Efford’s private member’s bill to repeal the Health and Social Care Act.
“Congress, we can still save our NHS. But the time to act is now.”
Ms Norman also spoke of the pay crisis for health staff, most of whom have suffered real-term pay cuts of between 8 and 12% since 2010.
UNISON is currently balloting its NHS workers in England for industrial action over pay. The ballot for NHS members in Wales opens on 30 September.
