In case you didn’t know, our NHS has a landlord. Yes, our supposedly public health service is renting hospitals from a private company. And now that company, Assura, has made £1.61 billion selling off its assets like GP surgeries to a US private equity giant.
The NHS: robbed in plain sight
Assura was established in 2003 and owns over 600 healthcare buildings, the majority of which it leases to the NHS. Despite such a large portfolio, it only has 79 members of staff further showing the whole thing is a con job.
Documentary the Great NHS Heist exposes Conservative Research Department documents from 1977. They outlined that privatisation of the NHS should go ahead “by stealth”, “fragmenting public monopolies” to allow the “sale of assets”. But Labour under Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer have continued the Tory privatisation agenda.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Stonepeak Partners will now be renting our healthcare infrastructure to us. What’s almost funny – if it wasn’t people’s healthcare being played with – is that bosses said they bring “deep pockets and an understanding of UK infrastructure and real estate”.
Investors don’t bring deeper pockets than the government, which has the entire country’s tax bill as its security and the ability to generate new money through quantitative easing. They also don’t bring an “understanding” of so-called “real estate” – workers such as builders, electricians, painters and plumbers do.
It makes no sense for the NHS to rent hospitals from the private sector. When the NHS previously built new hospitals like the expansion to district general hospitals in the 1960s, the government funded the buildings. There was no rent-extraction from companies like Assura. For the 2023/24 year, Assura’s passing rent roll was £150.6m and it’s net profit was £143.3m.
Underfund it, then privatise
In 2023, around 431,000 people from the UK sought medical treatment abroad, a five times increase from a decade ago, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This corresponds with successive governments starving the NHS of funding and then increasing privatisation.
According to the British Medical Association (BMA), there has been a real terms cumulative underspend of £425bn in public health spending since 2009/10. And Starmer announced a 20% increase in private provision of NHS services in January.
That same month, 5,000 nurses came forward to expose the ‘corridor care’ crisis in the NHS. That’s quite literally staff treating people in corridors across the health service because of systematic overcapacity.
The NHS would have more money for frontline services if it wasn’t paying rent to companies like Assura, now owned by US private equity.
Featured image via the Canary
