Wednesday's Letters: NHS reforms will end clinical acumen and compassion

Mr Lansley, the Health Secretary, is proposing a free market where commercial competition regulations take precedence over clinical acumen, evidence, and compassion. The NHS White Paper requires that all health services must be put out for competitive tender and that any organisation, whether NHS or private sector, and based in Leeds or Chicago, competes on an equal footing.

Competition based on price drives down short-term costs but diminishes quality and choice. This is great news for supermarket shoppers and Yorkshire has given the country one of the greatest examples of delivering low price, basic goods, but this is not a model with which to trust patient care.

The winners will be large multinational health care organisations who specialise in delivering the cheapest service while maintaining enough distance to avoid proper scrutiny and accountability. Profit-led healthcare has never benefited the sick, dying, and bewildered, so the losers will be our most vulnerable family members, friends, and neighbours.

From: Dr Ronan O'Leary, Leeds.

From: Tony Randerson, regional officer, Unite the Union, Ashville Avenue, Scarborough.

The coalition Government's plans for the NHS spell disaster for our local health service. Many people are not aware that the policies represent the biggest change to the NHS since it was founded in 1948. This government wants to move to a more American-style market health system, where hospitals and doctors have to compete with each other for business.

For patients this will mean a worse service. All our hospitals and community health services will be separated from the NHS and made into independent businesses, meaning any one of them could go bust or close a vital department like Accident and Emergency to save money.

Hospitals will be free to treat private paying customers first, with the rest of us having to wait our turn. Certain treatments like hernia operations could be dropped altogether, forcing people to pay.

GPs will be made to take on the role of accountants, buying services for patients, doing the job currently done here by North Yorkshire and York PCT. Will patients still trust their doctor if they think he or she is putting cost before their health? What will happen to the doctor-patient relationship when it turns out the GP is responsible for the decision to close the local hospital?

The Government's plans will also bring about a huge postcode lottery where drugs and treatments will be available to patients of one GP and denied to those of another. Plus there is the prospect of GP surgeries running out of money and telling patients they will have to wait until the new financial year before they can be treated.

The cost of making such huge changes to the NHS is going to be at least 3bn at a time when the country can least afford it, and they come alongside 20bn of "efficiency savings" in the NHS that will mean closures and cuts anyway.

None of these controversial policies were in the Conservative or Lib Dem manifestos at the election. They have come out of nowhere and are soon to be put to Parliament. We have to take a stand now to defend our health services.

Tax the parasitic bankers

From: Bob Swallow, Townhead Avenue, Settle, North Yorkshire.

I READ with interest, not to say incredulity, your front page story on bankers' bonuses (Yorkshire Post, January 12).

Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays – incidentally, he has an appropriate surname, he clearly leads a jewelled existence – states it is "time to put the blame game behind us". This in reply to members of the Treasury Select Committee.

A swingeing tax on Mr Diamond and the parasitic band of brothers (and sisters) he controls would go some way to alleviate the suffering of students and those of the elderly already in care or soon to face care. This is just for starters.

Do I see this happening? No. Why? There are too many parliamentarians in cahoots with the bankers. I suspect there will be the usual song and dance before the matter is quietly swept under the carpet.

The suggestion is made that such a tax would hasten the day when banks would up sticks for another country. Let them go, when they have repaid with interest our money. There are always other people ready to step into their shoes.

From: James Anthony Bulmer, Peel Street, Horbury, Wakefield.

The blame game – Mrs Thatcher to blame, Gordon Brown to blame, Labour to blame, banks, Conservatives to blame, Liberals to blame, and now the Coalition to blame. And yet society does not appear to have any blame attached for any of the problems and mess we are in at the present time. Should we go back to the start of our so-called democracy? We appear to blame previous governments for the demise of our once great industries – in the 1800s – which were the backbone of our economy and when our exports were in big demand and sensibly priced. And, without government subsidies as in later years of greed.

Is it that for years we have been giving the world a false impression of our capabilities, especially when we are now reliant on foreign companies and foreign banks for investment in our industries, and even investment in the beautiful game – football and other sporting activities. Do we own anything?

Most of the once British Empire was taken forcibly. Now we are having to be financially taken by almost every country in the world. Poor old Gordon Brown, his borrowed dream of Britain becoming the financial capital of the world has had several takeover bids, should we put the country up for auction?

Has society's greed, imposed by over-ambitious government, led us into this international industrial quagmire? Can we no longer run ourselves, let alone an Empire. Even Mr Blair's much flaunted "education, education, education" has fallen dramatically in the international educational league tables. Can the pupil no longer beat the master? The banks took the money. Never mind, it was probably borrowed anyway.

Cooper should stay put

From: Brian Lewis, Linden Terrace, Pontefract.

I WAS on my way back from the state of Gujarat – India's equivalent of Yorkshire – when I heard that Ed Miliband had moved Yvette Cooper from Shadow Foreign Secretary to the equivalent Home Office job. This saddened me for two reasons. I relished the thought of two big figures from the two main parties battling across the despatch box and my constituency MP besting the Bull of Richmond. I still see Parliament as theatre and enjoy watching BBC Parliament.

The second is more serious. We need foreign secretaries and their shadows who know about economics and Yvette Cooper is a trained economist as well as being a very experienced ex-minister. To my reckoning she has had 10 ministerial or shadow posts up to now. Hague's foreign affairs interests are more traditional and political. He writes about Pitt the Younger in his spare time.

As Blair found to his cost, the world has moved on and trade and banking are at the centre of the world agendas and gun-boat diplomacy is not. Cooper also knows India having spent time there as a backpacking student and India, with its economy expanding at nine per cent per annum, is a prize catch.

Solutions to pipe problem

From: B Davies, Normanton.

I HAVE followed recent articles on condensing boilers. As I have reached a ripe old age and am in poor health, I decided to dispose of my solid fuel boiler and have a condensing gas boiler fitted, which would be the answer to all heating difficulties – supposedly.

Everything fine, no painful kneeling or bending, until extremely cold weather arrived. One night the boiler started banging. When investigations proved that the outlet pipe had frozen I was advised to either place hot water bottles on pipe (eight would be needed) or pour hot water thereon (four to eight kettles full needed) – ideal for my age group, skating down an icy drive.

A simple solution was found – cover pipe with pieces of carpet, then lengths of wood and finally plastic sheeting. The front of my house looks like a skip, but no more freezing.

Hold on, British Gas can solve the problem by attaching an electric wire to the boiler sensor and coiling it down the condensate pipe, for just under 200.

Masterplans that left city with a costly mess

From: Douglas Hartley, Irving Terrace, Clayton, Bradford.

JOHN Roberts and Mark Casci set out the sorry state of Bradford (Yorkshire Post, January 15). In a recent issue of the council's publication Community Pride citizens were asked for their views on council plans and spending of taxpayers' money. I sent a three-page letter to a council official, covering the same ground as your reporters.

Now we know that the architect, Will Alsop, received 527,000 for his fantastic "masterplans" – the Great Lake around City Hall, the canal branch from Shipley, a "wet-lands" area along Thornton Road, where pedestrians were to walk on duck boards. Water, water, everywhere. Maud Marshall, chief executive of Bradford Centre Regeneration, was paid more than 800,000, despite the closure of the firm she headed.

The Tory-led council in 2003 welcomed the "masterplans." Its leader (now a baroness) commended them with enthusiasm to the public. Adrian Naylor, now Tory spokesman, still talks optimistically about "long-term" development in Bradford.

However, Forster Square remains a patch of grass, with no prospect of the promised retail development. I understand that retail development is going ahead at Leeds Trinity Quarter; at Wakefield, developers have signed up many well- known retail firms for the new buildings; in Halifax, building girders are going up on the Broad Street site.

In Bradford, contractors are working on the planned City Park – a waste of 24m. A small, attractive, parkland area on the site of the old police station could have been designed and created by Bradford Parks and Gardens Department at a fraction of the cost.

Maud Marshall's legacy, the shallow pool, with its 100 fountains, is to be fed by a costly network of large diameter underground iron pipes. The pool will attract litter. I understand it is to be drained and refilled regularly – a never-ending expense. Kris Hopkins, a Tory leader and now Keighley MP, boasted that the pool would draw thousands of tourists to Bradford. In fact, what would bring people to Bradford would be department stores of quality, like Brown Muffs and Busby's department stores of old.

Bradford is in a mess. Whereas the Leeds Majestyk cinema is to be refurbished as a leisure centre, the Bradford Odeon stands, neglected by Yorkshire Forward: a symbol of Bradford's decay.

Move forward on clock change

From: Peter R Hyde, Kendale View, Driffield, East Yorkshire.

Regarding the current discussions about keeping BST all the year round, it would seem that one of the main objections comes from Scotland. I would suggest that they are allowed to keep their own time and let us keep BST all year round, even doubling it in summer.

The amount of saving in fuel to provide lighting alone is a massive reason for abandoning the silly nonsense of putting the clocks back in winter. There will always be those dyed-in-the wool traditionalists who would make objections, but progressive common sense should be adopted and out-of-date arguments abandoned.

Undercutting UK workers

From: Colin Smith, Beech View Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire.

WILL crime rise as a result of cuts in police spending (Yorkshire Post, January 22)? Yes.

With regard to unemployment generally, I was speaking to someone who had lost their job and he said that he could cut unemployment figures very easily. When I asked him how, he replied that what was needed was a law saying that all employers had to pay all their workers the minimum wage and then to enforce that law.

The employers would not then employ overseas labour at a fraction of the cost of employing British workers.

Would it be as easy as that?

Good, clean fun rewarded

From: Terry Duncan, Greame Road, Bridlington, East Yorkshire.

Surely the list of accolades for the comedienne Miranda Hart (Yorkshire Post, January 24) illustrates that the public can laugh at good, clean comedy, without having to be drowned in the vile filth, language and gutter jokes employed by her less-talented contemporaries?