Received from: CSP
Disinvestment in public services harms workers and service users. In healthcare, a funding gap of £60bn has emerged since 2008, with UK spending falling behind the historic average.
Cuts contribute to a recruitment and retention crisis – stalled pay compounding the issue. Positions remain unfilled, with heavy demands placed on our remaining workforce, who experience work-related ill-health at rates higher than before Covid-19.
Services fail to meet our communities’ needs – the UK now lags behind international peers on life expectancy and other health outcomes. Rationing emerges, with patients missing out on rehabilitation and other healthcare provision, ruining lives, keeping people out of work, and depriving them of their independence.
Decimated capital spending corrodes infrastructure. Members work in of inadequate clinical spaces, without staff facilities. The safety and dignity of staff and service users compromised.
Policies like as the Health and Social Care levy are announced with fanfare, then dropped. Remedial initiatives, such as NHS England’s Workforce Plan, come with time-limited funding. This deafens the public to the threats facing us.
The UK will have a general election by January 2025. The public must be able to scrutinise prospective candidates – whatever their rosette – about public finances.
The public must hold whatever future government emerges to account for their decisions.
Congress calls for the TUC – with its affiliate unions – to campaign for public service investment. This should include the dissemination of robust evidence demonstrating the case for public finance restoration.
Chartered Society of Physiotherapy
AMENDMENT
› After para 4 add new paragraph:
“Underfunding in maternity units has meant inadequate or no ventilation systems, meaning unsafe levels of Entonox (gas and air) in the air. Maternity staff have been exposed to harmful levels, some units have had to withdraw the use of Entonox as a form of pain relief for maternity service users.”
Royal College of Midwives
AMENDMENT
› In paragraph 7, add the following sentence:
“The campaigning should also highlight the critical importance of multi-year settlements, of enough support staff and management capacity, and of sustained capital spending on infrastructure, without all of which the public stands to lose its return on greater public service investment.”
FDA