Last week, the NHS started to change. The laws which the government pushed through last year came into force. The changes would probably be even more alarming if it wasn’t for all the campaigning we’ve done together. But it’s all still pretty worrying.

With the changes now in force, we need to decide what we want to do next. What’s the priority? How can we best work together to defend the idea of a decent public health service we can rely on to look after us when we need it?

You can help us decide where the NHS campaign goes next. Please take two minutes to vote in a poll.

When the government finally got its changes through last year, 38 Degrees members were disappointed. But we voted to keep the campaign going. And since then, by working together, we’ve made a huge difference:

• Thousands of 38 Degrees members across the country have asked their local GPs to put patients first and keep the NHS public. We’ve already signed up groups of local GPs in the Midlands, south-west and London.
• We moved fast when we heard that the government was looking at a new tax dodge for the private health industry. Thousands of us wrote in to complain. The plan was dropped within hours!
• There’s been big problems with privatised GP out-of-hours care in places like Cornwall. So hundreds of thousands of us demanded an investigation into what happened there. An inquiry has now been launched by the influential Public Accounts Committee of MPs.
• Just last month, the government announced new rules which could force GPs to hand almost all health contracts to private companies. Over 350,000 of us signed the petition and wrote to our MPs. This helped force the government to withdraw the rules – a big win, though there’s still more to do.

It works because we all work together. So please help decide what we do next by taking the poll.

Should we be focusing on protecting the NHS from budget cuts? Stopping further privatisation? Supporting local campaigns like those against hospital closures? Or making sure that when managers fail to protect patient care, like in Mid Staffs, they’re held properly responsible?

We can do a lot, but we can’t do everything. So please vote!

Below is a blog written by David, a 38 Degrees member in Haringey. David and other local 38 Degrees members have recently convinced the Haringey CCG to adopt some important amendments into their constitution that will protect local NHS services from dangerous privatisation. 

On Thursday last week Haringey CCG made public their draft constitution, which included the 38 Degrees amendments on procurement and commissioning virtually word for word. The amendments mean the CCG has to consider whether it is ‘necessary, desirable or appropriate’ to invite competition when purchasing health services.

The victory comes after a couple of months of persistent pressure and lobbying. We first met as a group in early November last year. The turnout at the meeting was a good indication of the strength of feeling in Haringey – over 30 people turned up despite the limited meeting space and we had to be given a larger room. We learnt that 2252 Haringey residents had signed the 38 Degrees petition. We decided that a group of us would present the petition to the Chair of the CCG as soon as they would agree to meet us, which turned out to be the first week of January.

The meeting went well with the CCG Chair, Chief Officer and Lay Representative attending. They told us that as a membership organisation the CCG needed to consult their members, the local GPs, and  their lawyers before making any amendments to the constitution. They said they had to comply with EU competition legislation. Thanks to 38 Degrees, we were able to tell them that they had been produced by public law lawyers and had already been adopted by City & Hackney CCG. They said they would let us know what the outcome was by the end of February.

When they wrote to us following the meeting they were a bit vague about consulting with the GPs, and it turned out that they had finished the consultation with GPs in December. Therefore we felt we had been misled at the meeting. It was difficult to get information out of them so we decided to attend the meeting of CCG board at the end of January and table formal questions about the consultation process. We did a call out to people who attended the initial meeting to support those asking the questions. Again the response was fantastic with over 30 people attending. They had to search the building for more chairs as the six they had provided clearly wasn’t enough.

The meeting wasn’t handled well. We were given written answers to our questions that were then read aloud, and we were not allowed to ask questions to clarify the answers we had just been given. The atmosphere became a little fraught! Those of us there decided we needed to meet again to keep up the pressure on the CCG board. We wrote to all the GPs in Haringey, we contacted the local press, we contacted local counsellors on the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, we contacted our local MP, and planned a public meeting.

We were supported in our campaign by our local health anti-privatisation group Defend Haringey Health Services. They had done a lot of work last year trying to get the CCG to sign up to a pledge to resist the top down imposition of Any Qualified Provider. They had connections to other local anti-cuts and anti-privatisation groups which helped build support for the amendments.

The constitution is still in draft form and will be formally adopted at the next meeting of the CCG board on the 14th March, which will be at the West Green Learning Centre at 1.30pm. We’ll be encouraging everybody involved in the campaign to attend to witness the CCG taking this bold step.

We are planning to go ahead with our public meeting and we’ve invited a representative of the CCG to talk about the constitution and their Patient and Public Engagement Strategy. We want to have an impact on the way health services are commissioned and provided in Haringey in the future, and the adoption of the 38 Degrees commissioning amendments by the CCG is a good start! The recent news about the coalition trying to sneak through the Section 75 legislations that will force CCGs to put contracts out to tender means that we need to keep campaigning. Sign the petition here.

If you’d like to be involved in the local NHS campaign in Haringey please do get in touch - haringey38degrees@gmail.com

David

Following Simon Burns’ comments about 38 Degrees members in Parliament last week, other MPs have been commenting. Thankfully they don’t all seem to feel comfortable comparing their voters to zombies! Below is what they’ve had to say.

Fiona Bruce MP, Conservative MP for Congleton, said: “I haven’t heard the exact words [of Simon Burns] but can assure you that I think 38 Degrees does a service in enabling constituents to contact their MPs , so that we really know how people are feeling about issues; such communications are critical for me….. So keep communicating – only then can we together effect positive change!”

Tim Farron MP, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale and President of the Liberal Democrats, said: “I don’t think 38 Degrees members, or anyone else who takes the trouble to contact me, is a zombie. It’s a totally inappropriate way for an elected politician to talk about their voters. We should be encouraging people to get involved in the political process not insulting those who do.”

Stella Creasy MP, Labour MP for Walthamstow, said: “Campaigning organisations like 38 Degrees are playing a useful role in energising Britain’s political process by encouraging the public to engage with their MPs – it’s up to us to then develop the debate and discussion they start with those we represent, either online or offline and whether we agree with them or not. Rather than calling people zombies and dismissing their concerns, ministers may wish to reflect on why their healthcare proposals have generated such a strong response from their constituents.”

Natascha Engel MP, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire and chair of the Backbench Business Committee, said: “When voters take the trouble to contact their MP, we should be welcoming that and encouraging them to engage further. We certainly shouldn’t be calling them names. I’ve engaged with 38 degrees members in my constituency and they certainly don’t seem like zombies to me.”

What do you think about what these MPs have said? Have you heard from other MPs about what they think about Simon Burns’ comments? Share your thoughts below.

What’s he trying to hide? For a year health minister Andrew Lansley has been refusing to publish a civil service report on the risks he’s taking with the NHS. Now the Information Commissioner has ordered him to publish it. But he could still keep it hidden for another month – until after more key votes have taken place.

We can’t afford to wait that long. The House of Lords is debating the NHS plans right now. If the report on risks to the NHS is released immediately, it could persuade key members of the House of Lords to stand up to the government.

Pressure from MPs could force Lansley to publish this report. If enough of us contact them now, we can get it out in the open before it’s too late. MPs won’t want to find themselves back under fire because of Lansley’s cover-up. So let’s all email our MPs now and tell them they have to force Lansley to publish his secret NHS risks report.

The Information Commissioner’s ruling lists Andrew Lansley’s arguments for why he wants this report kept secret. Lansley argued that releasing the report “would have jeopardised the success of the policy”! He’s kept us, MPs, and members of the Lords in the dark deliberately because he’s worried that making these risks public could derail his plans.

The NHS belongs to all of us. We all pay for it, and we all rely on it to care for us and our loved ones. We don’t want it put at risk – that’s exactly why we’ve been campaigning together all these months. We have a right to see what this report says.

Let’s raise an uproar in Parliament and force Lansley’s hand. Email your MP now and tell them to demand this secret NHS report is made public immediately.

38 Degrees with Bob Russel, MP for Colchester, outside Parliament this morning

This morning, 38 Degrees volunteers went down to Westminster to deliver the petition on calling for a Robin Hood Tax, and take our message to MPs as they arrived at work. Alongside volunteers from Oxfam, Save the Children and lots of other organisations, we spent over an hour outside Parliament.

We caught lots of MPs on their way into the Houses of Parliament and asked them to put pressure on David Cameron before he leaves for the world leaders’ G20 meeting tomorrow. And at least one of them did: Caroline Lucas asked David Cameron in Prime Minister’s Questions if he would listen to the protesters outside parliament and the 80,000 people (including over 15,000 38 Degrees members) who have signed the petition asking him to back the Robin Hood Tax at the global meeting.

What will David Cameron do this week? Will he listen to the bankers and vote against putting the brakes on banks? Or will he back a tax to help fight poverty, combat climate change and protect public services, schools and hospitals? There’ll be more news from the G20 talks in France coming soon on the 38 Degrees blog.

The clock is ticking. The government shuts its consultation on proposed changes to the planning system in just over a week.

Almost 100,000 38 Degrees members have signed the petition against the proposed planning changes. The more of us who sign the petition the more likely we are to change the government’s mind.

Here are some of the things journalists, experts and organisations such as the National Trust have been saying abou the government’s plans:

The chief executive of the National Housing Federation says: ‘there are serious dangers that these changes could let private developers off the hook in terms of delivering thousands of affordable homes on their developments.’

“The new planning rules will scrap “section 106″ agreements which provide half the 50,000 affordable new homes” according to Michael White.

The main cause of the housing crisis isn’t planning, it’s ‘the lack of money – thanks in no small part to the government’s decision to cut the affordable housing budget by 60%’ argues Caroline Lucas MP.

The National Trust has set out 10 ‘asks’ of the government on how the NPPF should be amended. These include:

• The NPPF should adopt an explicit ‘brownfield first’ approach
• It is fundamentally wrong that neighbourhood plans should be led and funded by business
• The NPPF needs clarification of how planning should promote genuinely, robustly defined, sustainable development

George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist, points out “the framework’s new presumption in favour of sustainable development – by which the government means all development except coal-mining – will make it almost impossible to resist a developer’s proposal. It takes a system that is already unfair, unbalanced and undemocratic and makes it even worse”.

Under pressure from opponents of the planning reforms (including tens of thousands of 38 Degrees members), the planning minister Greg Clark has admitted that the proposals in the NPPF on brownfield land, housing targets and “sustainable development” could have been clearer.

The consultation period ends in just over a week – let’s keep up the pressure. If we work together to get more people involved in the campaign and more signatures on our petition, we can stop the government’s plans to sell off our countryside just as 38 Degrees members stopped them selling off our forests!

Please add your name to the petition, it only takes a minute, and then share this page with a friend:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/save-our-countryside

On Friday, we’re meeting with the government’s forests panel, to tell them our priorities for protecting our forests. Here’s the email:

The government’s forests panel have asked 38 Degrees members for a meeting this Friday to find out our priorities for protecting Britain’s forests in the future.

Because we can’t fit all 500,000+ people who’ve campaigned to save our forests around the table, 38 Degrees members have spent the last few weeks attending get-togethers and sharing our ideas for the future of our forests. [1]

Using the same technology that helps analyse regular member surveys, we’ve worked out our three top demands from 38 Degrees members to the forests panel:

1. Keeping our forests in public ownership

2. Protecting the incredible variety of animals and plants that live in our forests

3. Making sure as many people as possible are able to enjoy our forests, including those who don’t have access to a car, or use a wheelchair, as well as those who want to ride horses or bikes

If you’re on board with these priorities, click to show your support by signing our new petition now – and we’ll present it to the panel on Friday:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/our-forest-panel-message

This panel could come under pressure from government. They could end up recommending wise ways of protecting forests for the future, or they could end up legitimising another stab at a sell-off in a few years’ time.

Because 38 Degrees members worked together in record numbers to stop the sell-off of England’s forests in the first place, we already have their attention – and so far engagement has been constructive. When the panel put out the call for submissions from the public, nearly 35,000 of us responded. [2]

Our submissions made such an impact that they rang the 38 Degrees office to arrange a meeting to discuss our views in more depth. The question now is, will this panel ultimately give the government a back door for privatisation? Or will they hold firm to the bedrock principles we should never abandon at any price?

Help tip the balance in favour of honest, sensible recommendations for the future of our forests: add your name to the petition now:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/our-forest-panel-message

Just a few months ago, politicians were shocked to discover that protecting forests wasn’t just the hobby of a few people, but something lots of us cared passionately about, and were prepared to fight for in large numbers. [3] We proved that when 537,490 of us signed the Save Our Forests petition. [4]

Now we’re going to meet the forests panel in Bedgebury National Pinetum and Forest in Kent this Friday to hand over all our suggestions – and to ensure our top priorities can’t be missed.

Public ownership. Protecting wildlife and plant diversity. Accessibility for all. Add your name to back these priorities now and let’s deliver a united message piled high with signatures – that we expect them to stand tall with the people, and insist we protect England’s woodlands for future generations:

https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/our-forest-panel-message