We must face up to neoliberalism’s flaws if we’re to halt climate breakdown

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OPINION: Tackling the climate crisis effectively requires transition to a more fair and sustainable global economy

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) delivered a report this week that is especially sobering in light of the fact that the committee is an independent, statutory body, established under the Climate Change Act 2008. The CCC is not just a think tank. Its function is “to advise the UK and devolved governments on emissions targets and to report to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change”.

Funded by the government, the committee is developing a reputation for being surprisingly blunt when it comes to government policy.

This was amply demonstrated in this week’s report, covered in some detail by the Environment Journal and neatly summed up by a single paragraph:

Simply put, the National Adaptation Programme (NAP) – which should respond to the scale of the challenge – falls well short. According to the CCC, it lacks a clear vision for the future, is not underpinned by tangible targets, and is not driving policy changes or steps towards implementation. If this does not improve then wider measures, including the net zero journey and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems, will also fail.

Just a day later, the government delivered its revised plan to meet its climate change targets, with a heavy emphasis on carbon capture and nuclear power. It was received with relief by the oil and gas industry, but with a singularly large raspberry by environmental analysts.

By coincidence, the week also saw a study published following research by Australian climate scientists. As reported in The Guardian, it predicted: “Melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise.”

This is just one of several reports on recent research showing that radical and rapid decarbonisation is now vital if climate breakdown and chaos are to be avoided. The reports raise two vital questions: What does rapid decarbonisation involve in practice? And what are the chances of success?

Back in 2020, the Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change (IGCC) estimated that to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C, a 7% decline in carbon dioxide output was needed every year for the whole decade. That has already failed for the first three years of the 2020s and a per annum decrease of about 10% is now needed, equivalent to a 60% decrease overall.

The likes of carbon capture and more nuclear power for the richer states are simply a non-starters

On the question of how to achieve this, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the universities of Manchester (UK), Uppsala (Sweden) and Bergen (Norway), and co-founder of the Climate Uncensored website, spells out what is required in the Scientists for Global Responsiblity’s journal, Responsible Science.

He writes that a starting point is that the world’s major emitters, the wealthier states, must get to zero carbon emissions by 2030 to 2035 to allow the poorer states extra time to follow suit. On this timescale, the likes of carbon capture and more nuclear power for the richer states are simply a non-starters. It would take far too long to reach net zero using these methods.

So what would this involve for a country such as the UK? Anderson sketches out a few examples, starting off with an immediate moratorium on airport expansion and an 80% cut in air travel by 2030. No new internal combustion engine cars would be built after 2025, and there would be a huge shift away from private cars in urban areas and towards public transport and active travel (such as walking and cycling). There would be a nationwide retrofit on all existing housing stock “rolling it out street by street at mass scale”, and new housing would be built to “passive house” standards.

Anderson underpins the whole process by a massive expansion of electrification across the entire energy system, with an obvious emphasis on wind, solar and other renewables, already cheaper than coal, oil or gas.

There is much more to Anderson’s article, so you should read it yourself, but three elements stand out. The first is that what is required is, in effect, a ‘Marshall Plan’ for a greened world. He uses the term to indicate the ambition necessary rather than, as in the original, the US helping Europe.

That brings us to the second element – the money to effect that change must come from the richer sectors of society right across the world. Although Anderson does not spell it out in detail, these cannot just be the super-rich, the ultra-high net worth individuals who now number close to 600,000 worldwide. It must also include the many millions more who are merely ‘high-net-worth’ people on a global scale.

This questions the very basis of the current economic model, but that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has looked in any detail at what needs to be done. A frequent conclusion is that neoliberalism just isn’t fit for purpose when it comes to wealth distribution, and it is also not able to respond to climate breakdown at anything like the speed that is needed.

For his third point, Anderson points to some of the benefits that would follow in the wake of the changes. They include the elimination of fuel poverty; improved and warmer homes that are cheaper to run; better internal and external air quality; high-quality, reliable public transport; quieter urban spaces with more room for playing fields, parks and recreation; and plenty of skilled jobs supporting the green transition.

We might add that it also means finally facing up to the deep flaws in neoliberalism, especially those market fundamentalist dimensions that simply cannot, by their nature, respond to climate breakdown .

We might not meet Anderson’s timetable, but we will have no option over the next decade but to come very close to it, since the alternative of a chaotic global climate will be increasingly evident.

In any case, look at it this way. Not only will we get on top of climate breakdown, but we will start the transition to a fair and sustainable global economy. That really is something worth aiming for.

Original article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingWe must face up to neoliberalism’s flaws if we’re to halt climate breakdown

Why Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients

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Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Once Palantir is inside our health service, it will be hard to get rid of. The NHS should think carefully

NHS sign

This week I debated the future of the NHS with a cardboard cutout. This was, I confess, a bit of a let-down: Louis Mosley, the UK head of Palantir, looked very fine in 2D, watermelon cocktail in hand, but we’d hoped for the man himself. He’d agreed to debate Foxglove about the NHS’s massive new plans for our health data, only to pull out at the last minute, citing ‘commitments in eastern Europe’. I suspect the real reason is that the government leant on him – and the conference organisers – to scuttle the debate. So much for public engagement.

Funny cutouts aside, this is a serious matter. The NHS, as we can see from the strikes this week, is in a historic crisis. As well as 120,000 care vacancies, the NHS has over 3,000 vacant tech roles – which stops the service from evolving to meet future needs. But instead of gripping this crisis with a credible workforce plan, the government proposes to spend nearly half a billion pounds on a database.

This is what I was hoping to debate with Louis. The government wants to give his spy-tech firm, Palantir, the contract to manage a vast new ‘Federated Data Platform’. If it goes ahead as envisaged, the FDP will be the largest single point of access to patient data this country has ever seen. It’s a pity it was left to me and Dr Marcus Baw, a GP and health IT specialist, to debate this system – because there’s so much the government won’t say about it. Like exactly what shape it will take or what purposes it will eventually serve; what it will eventually cost; who will have access; or how patient choice and consent will be honoured.

The proposed system is vast. The aim is for it to sweep in hospital, GP, even social care records – and make all this patient data available to government planners and others.

Now, parts of this are all to the good. The NHS badly needs to make better and more efficient use of patient data for the good of the NHS and of patients; there are inefficiencies in the system that urgently need fixing. But we, and many experts within the NHS we speak to, have serious concerns about the design of this contract: about whether the procurement has been fair; whether the system will work as designed; and whether Palantir, which is mainly known for supporting CIA drone attacks, predictive policing and deportation raids, is a remotely appropriate partner for the NHS.

That’s why Foxglove (with openDemocracy) brought multiple legal cases seeking to shed light on this shadowy spy-tech firm’s beachhead in the NHS since their very first £1 no-bid pandemic contract. It’s also why 50 other groups have signed the ‘No Palantir’ pledge, saying a company whose values are so manifestly opposed to those of the NHS has no place handling so much sensitive patient data.

Having one supplier to join up data and analyse it risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure

But there are deeper issues with the FDP. It runs the risk of stealing oxygen – and funding – from other critical work already underway to help the NHS join up its patient data for good. For example, openSafely, a flagship national data platform for health research, was developed by Ben Goldacre and a team at Oxford and was used for vital Covid research. It’s completely open source, safe and lights a way forward for trustworthy health research. It also costs a fraction of what Palantir does.

What’s more, pushing so much access and control to the centre may not make sense. For some issues – vaccination, workforce planning – there is a clear case for a national solution. But ultimately, most care is delivered locally and planned regionally. There are already places, such as London, that have pioneered solutions to pool patient data to plan care better – at a fraction of the FDP’s cost. It is far from clear how this will interact with the FDP, or whether it can survive the new system.

Other competitors – like a UK consortium of universities and open-source firms that are apparently bidding for the deal – would have loved a fair crack at the FDP contract. But let’s be honest: they probably haven’t got a snowball’s chance at beating Palantir’s incumbent advantage, won through a mixture of insider influence and watermelon cocktail lobbying.

Once Palantir’s in, it will be hard to get it out. The technical architecture is proprietary – and other government agencies have struggled to get off Palantir when they’ve tried. Having a single supplier to help you join up data and analyse it also risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure.

Indeed, if you take Palantir chief executive Alex Karp at his word, that’s the plan. “We are working towards a future where all large institutions in the United States and its allies abroad are running significant segments of their operations, if not their operations as a whole, on Palantir,” he wrote. “Most other companies are targeting small segments of the market. We see and intend to capture the whole.” That reads like an express statement of an intention to seek monopoly power.

It’s also clear they’re in it to profit. Their chief technology officer, Shyam Shankar, recently wrote: “The problem with defen[c]e contracting is not the popular narrative that contractors make too much money. It is actually that they make too little money… Innovators will need outsized profits to motivate progress.” Monopoly and profiteering may be good for Palantir’s share price, but they sit uncomfortably with the ethos of a public health service.

Joining up the NHS’s disparate health data systems better will present stiff challenges, and the NHS will face trade-offs – buying in consultants may be easier in the short term, for example, but may prove more expensive in the long run. But at the moment the government is stonewalling legal letters asking even basic questions about the FDP. And they are also creating facts on the ground that could be seen to favour Palantir. The legal basis for all of this, now that the pandemic’s suspension of protections for patient data has lapsed, is unclear.

People care deeply about how their health data is used. We go to the doctor to share our worries, our fears, and our pain – and if we don’t trust that conversation to be private, we may not go at all. People want to feel safe to contribute their health data for the good of the NHS – but when the government runs out ahead of patient trust, overhauling patient data systems without explaining what it wants to do, who will see the data, and what safeguards there are, people baulk. In 2021 more than a million people in a month opted out of sharing their health data because they didn’t trust the government’s last plans to pool their GP records. The history of the NHS is a boneyard of such schemes: massive, expensive white elephants that all failed because the government didn’t take the time to get the governance or consent right.

It is past time for the government to learn from these mistakes. We can build a better future for our patient data – if we take the time to design carefully, honouring patient choice and thinking about what system will serve the NHS for the long haul. Anything less is likely to fail and set the cause of progress back another five years.

Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingWhy Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients

NHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

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Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Palantir, whose owner claimed the NHS ‘makes people sick’, will ‘collect and process confidential patient information’

Hundreds of NHS hospitals have been ordered to share people’s confidential medical records with an American spy-tech company owned by a billionaire Trump donor, openDemocracy can reveal.

Palantir Technologies – the secretive Silicon Valley firm first funded by the CIA – will collect patient information from all hospitals in England, according to internal NHS documents.

In a letter sent last month, the health service finance chief Julian Kelly gave NHS trusts until the end of March to begin uploading patient information to a new central database that uses Palantir’s Foundry software.

The instruction came despite a government pledge, made after openDemocracy sued the Department of Health and Social Care in 2021, to consult the public before agreeing to work with Palantir again.

The new database, called ‘Faster Data Flows’, collects daily information about hospital patients – including their dates of birth, postcodes and detailed medical histories – that was previously held by individual trusts and shared less frequently.

NHS England told openDemocracy it would alter or remove identifiable personal information before it was passed to Palantir – a process referred to by the health service as “pseudonymisation”. Palantir also insisted that it does not have access to any “identifiable medical records”.

But an NHS document obtained by openDemocracy admits that the company will “collect and process confidential patient information”. It is not clear what, precisely, this processing entails.

Lawyers for three patient advocacy groups said that NHS England had not addressed vital legal and privacy concerns. “Slapping a sticker over your NHS number doesn’t suddenly mean your health record needs no protection,” said Cori Crider, a lawyer at Foxglove Legal. “People are very easy to re-identify from pseudonymised data.”

The news also raises fresh concerns that Palantir is being lined up to win a contentious £480m contract to process unprecedented amounts of NHS data without patient consent.

Palantir was originally funded by the CIA and has been heavily criticised for producing surveillance tech for police forces that allegedly creates “racist feedback loops” and has helped the US government to track and deport undocumented migrants.

The company’s founder, Peter Thiel, donated $1.25m to Donald Trump’s election campaign. Earlier this year he said the NHS “makes people sick” and claimed British affection for the health service was akin to “Stockholm syndrome”.

Tory MP David Davis told openDemocracy he was concerned “by the NHS appearing to be favouring an organisation with the provenance of Palantir”.

“NHS England should not be attempting to do this without explicit approval from Parliament,” he said, calling on the health secretary Steve Barclay to “explain himself” to MPs “before further action is taken”.

‘Faster data’

The pilot to trial Faster Data Flows to “support decision making” by doctors was launched in June 2022, with 21 “early adopters” joining.

The information it captured – including “admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity” as well as personal details – was uploaded daily to a central portal built by Palantir. Palantir itself was described in pilot documents as a “sub-processor” of the data, which is a legal term given to a third party that has permission to process information gathered by others.

NHS execs knew their work with Palantir carried a “reputational risk”. The pilot documents state: “The use of Palantir to collect and process data… is likely to be perceived by some privacy campaigners as contentious and therefore there is a relatively high risk of media coverage and adverse comment about this”.

In November, lawyers working for Foxglove wrote to NHS England on behalf of the National Pensioners’ Convention, Just Treatment and the Doctors Association UK, to raise concerns about the sharing of pseudonymised data.

The lawyers questioned whether consent requirements – which are needed to process pseudonymised data – had been violated, and what safeguards, if any, had been put in place to protect patient privacy.

NHS England has still not sent a substantive reply after more than three months but has now instructed all trusts to implement Faster Data Flows.

‘Rigged’

Palantir is considered a “strong frontrunner” for a controversial new IT contract worth £480m to build a database that is expected to include all health information currently held by the NHS, including GP and social care records.

There are concerns that the rollout of Palantir’s Foundry to hospitals now – during the tendering process – may provide the tech firm with an incumbent advantage.

“Every trust in England will be forced to integrate Foundry into their workflows,” said GP IT consultant and clinical informatics expert Marcus Baw. “This means there has already been significant taxpayer investment in using Foundry.

“Trusts are busy, with limited IT team capacity, so they cannot afford to redo work. To me this means that the system will already have significant momentum towards Palantir and Foundry.”

A Department for Health and Social Care minister stated last month that whoever wins the contract will need to migrate data from Foundry into the new FDP system.

Labour MP Clive Lewis told openDemocracy that “the bid looks rigged… politicians of all parties should be screaming to the rafters about this”.

Revolving door

Palantir was first given an NHS contract in 2020 – without tender – to help manage the Covid-19 vaccine rollout while Matt Hancock was health secretary. Hancock used special ministerial powers to bypass patient confidentiality rules and allow the company to process patient data.

It won a further contract that was neither published nor tendered for – leading openDemocracy to sue the DHSC. After this legal action, the government released its contracts with Palantir and promised to consult the public before making further deals.

But our leaked documents reveal that NHS bosses have now ordered a rollout of Palantir software to hospitals across England, in a seeming breach of that promise.

The firm has also exploited a weakly regulated ‘revolving door’ in the NHS – poaching at least three former NHS data experts – as it chases the “must-win” contract. One of its recent hires, Indra Joshi, served as head of artificial intelligence for the NHS and helped launch the Covid-19 datastore – the first NHS project to use Foundry – before quitting the health service and joining Palantir in April 2022.

Harjeet Dhaliwal, who was previously deputy director of data services at NHS England, joined the firm later that same year.

The two ex-NHS staffers joined Paul Howells at Palantir, the company’s “health and care director”, who previously led a national data programme for NHS Wales.

Palantir did not respond to questions about whether the trio now work on NHS-related projects.

Palantir has lobbied the government extensively, famously entertaining the NHS executive Lord Prior with watermelon cocktails. The company also considered a contentious strategy described as ‘Buying Our Way In’. Emails sent by Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK chief, said the company would try “hoovering up” smaller businesses with NHS contracts to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”, according to Bloomberg News.

NHS England did not respond to openDemocracy’s questions about whether the processing of patient data on Palantir’s Foundry platform was lawful.

A spokesperson said: “By collecting data in a more streamlined way, the NHS is better able to plan and allocate resources to maximise outcomes for patients, while ensuring that their personal data remains protected and within the NHS at all times.

“Ultimately, it will help all NHS organisations to better understand their waiting lists and pressures in near real time, work as systems, and significantly reduce the burden of manual reporting on staff.”

A Palantir Spokesperson said: “Any claim that Palantir has access to identifiable medical records through the Faster Data Flow programme is false – not a single Palantir employee does.

“We have simply built software that is being used to make a programme that already existed work faster – much like our software has been used during Covid to deliver the vaccine rollout and, subsequently, to cut waiting lists and speed up cancer diagnosis.”

Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

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Continue ReadingNHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

UK government lets airlines off the hook for £300m air pollution bill

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Original article by Lucas Amin and Ben Webster at openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The government wrote off emissions equivalent to 400,000 passengers flying from London to Sydney and back in one year

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/air-air-travel-airbus-aircraft-358319/

The government gave more than £300m worth of free ‘pollution permits’ to airline companies including British Airways, RyanAir and EasyJet under a scheme designed to tackle climate change.

The UK’s Emissions Trading Scheme is meant to reduce carbon emissions by forcing big polluters to buy a permit for each tonne of carbon they emit, with the money going into the public purse.

But data obtained by openDemocracy reveals the UK’s aviation sector was handed more than four million “pollution permits” last year, free of charge.

The 4.1 million tonnes of CO2 they represent are equivalent to the emissions of more than 400,000 passengers flying economy-class from London to Sydney and back. The free permits saved airlines the equivalent of £336m based on the annual average carbon price – 39% more than the previous year, 2021.

EasyJet, RyanAir and British Airways were the big winners of the handouts, bagging permits worth £84m, £73m and £58m respectively. The companies all made heavy losses during the pandemic but have since become profitable again: British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG) announced profits of £1.3bn last month, while RyanAir just enjoyed its “most profitable December quarter on record” and easyJet is reporting “record-breaking sales”.

openDemocracy has previously revealed how oil and gas companies including Shell and BP were similarly handed more than £1bn worth of free pollution permits during 2022.

Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, told openDemocracy the government was “letting aviation companies get away with it” and “forcing the public to pick up the tab”.

“Ministers must bring an end to these free pollution permits immediately, and make high-carbon companies pay for the climate-wrecking damage they’re causing,” she added.

The Department for Net Zero and Energy Security is now analysing the results of a consultation on phasing out free permits for the aviation sector – but policy changes will not take effect until at least 2026.

The government has already allocated 12.2 million free permits for the next three years, which at last year’s carbon price will be worth a further £965m.

A government spokesperson told openDemocracy the UK was giving away free permits because it was “committed to tackling climate change” but also to “protecting our industry from carbon leakage”.

But the risk of carbon leakage – when companies relocate to countries that do not have carbon pricing – is “minimal”, according to research commissioned by the government itself.

The study by Frontier Economics on behalf of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) also found that ending permit giveaways would lead to a decrease in airline profits and improve market competition.

Daniele de Rao, an aviation expert at Carbon Market Watch, told openDemocracy: “Despite several studies showing that the risk of carbon leakage in the aviation sector is insignificant, airlines are still receiving an enormous amount of free allocation.

“The United Kingdom should apply the ‘polluters pay’ principle in its own ETS and, following the European Union’s example, should end the handout of free pollution permits to airlines as soon as possible.”

Matt Finch, UK policy manager of campaign group Transport & Environment, added: “The nation is up in arms about sewage pollution, but at the same time our government is paying airlines millions of pounds a year to pollute. Are these the actions of a climate leader? No. Free allowances should be phased out of the ETS as quickly as possible.”

The remaining £120m in free permits was carved up among the rest of the UK airline industry – with even the owners of private jets getting handouts.

Ineos Aviation, the company owned by oil and gas billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, was given free permits worth around £2,000.

The government has claimed that “our UK ETS is more ambitious than the EU system it replaces”.

But the EU has voted to phase out free permit allocations from 2026. It also redistributes the revenues raised by permit sales to environmental projects – whereas in the UK the proceeds are retained by the Treasury.

A government spokesperson told openDemocracy: “The UK is committed to tackling climate change while protecting our industry from carbon leakage. That is why a proportion of allowances are allocated for free to businesses under the UK Emissions Trading Scheme.”

They claimed handing free permits to airline giants would “support industry in the transition to net zero in the context of high global energy prices while incentivising long term decarbonisation”.

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Original article by Lucas Amin and Ben Webster at openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingUK government lets airlines off the hook for £300m air pollution bill

Ofgem ignored 700,000 debt complaints before British Gas scandal

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Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Exclusive: Energy regulator did nothing about mountain of complaints until British Gas prepayment scandal was revealed

Image of banknotes and prepayment meter key
More than 30,000 complaints were about the disconnection and forced installation of prepayment meters.  Image of banknotes and a prepayment meter key

Energy companies received more than 700,000 complaints about their treatment of debt-ridden customers over the last five years, openDemocracy can reveal.

In the last year alone, the energy regulator Ofgem was made aware of 40,000 complaints relating to the controversial forced fitting or disconnecting of pre-payment meters.

Yet the watchdog was only forced into action earlier this month when an undercover Times investigation found British Gas had sent bailiffs to break into vulnerable people’s homes and fit the meters by force. Following the expose, it suspended the practice until the end of March.

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, announced today that its profit had hit £3.3bn for 2022 – more than triple the £948m it made in 2021 – just weeks after the regulator launched an investigation into its use of bailiffs against at-risk customers.

Now, data obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request has revealed for the first time the scale of alleged mistreatment of vulnerable customers since the energy price cap was first hiked in April.

“Ofgem has known about this crisis for years, and so have the companies themselves. Suppliers are not being honest when they act like they’ve just discovered it and they’re shocked, like the CEO of Centrica did,” Ruth London, co-founder of the Fuel Poverty Action campaign group, told openDemocracy.

Energy companies are required to report the number of complaints they receive from customers every month to Ofgem. Last year, they received 161,103 complaints related to disconnection and debt issues – of which 40,458 were about pre-payment meters – though Ofgem has consistently refused to tell us which suppliers received the most.

The category includes complaints from customers about their energy supply being disconnected or having a prepayment meter installed forcibly without a warrant or despite them being vulnerable.

Other examples of complaints include customers being disconnected by error or without due process and being put on debt repayment plans that are unsuitable or unaffordable.

The true number of people being ill-treated is likely to be much higher. Ofgem revealed at the beginning of February that customers were being left on hold for hours by energy companies, leading to more than half hanging up before they could report an issue.

Ofgem said revealing how many complaints different companies had received would breach Section 105 of the 2000 Utilities Act, which states that the public disclosure of information companies supply to the regulator is prohibited in order to protect national security. The law has previously been criticised for preventing whistleblowers from raising issues about the energy sector that are in the public interest.

The regulator said after the British Gas scandal broke that it was “unacceptable” to forcibly install prepayment meters before all other options had been exhausted.

But charities have criticised it for ignoring calls to end the practice for months.

“Lives have been and are being lost because of their silence and refusal to act on the truth they have long known,” said London.

Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said it “should not have taken this long” for Ofgem to act. 

The charity said it saw more people unable to afford to top up their pre-payment metre last year than for the entirety of the previous decade combined.

The Times reported that British Gas customers who had prepayment meters forcibly installed had included a woman in her 50s who the company’s bailiffs were told had severe mental health problems and a mother whose “daughter is disabled and has a hoist and electric wheelchair”.

The paper’s undercover investigation also alleged that the Arvato Financial Solutions employees were incentivised with bonuses to fit prepayment meters. The boss of British Gas owner Centrica apologised and said he was “disappointed, livid and gutted”.

Last year, a non-executive director at the regulator resigned saying Ofgem had “not struck the right balance between the interests of consumers and interests of suppliers”.

Peter Smith, policy director at the charity National Energy Action, said: “The recent announcement by major suppliers that they would temporarily pause forced installations of pre-payment meters is welcome, but this was prompted by public shaming of suppliers and there is still no market-wide ban.

“We also desperately need a coherent plan to help millions of people already trapped on prepayment meters. This means rewiring the energy market to provide more affordable tariffs and finding new ways to address the underlying debt issues which are rife due to soaring energy costs.”

Richard Lane, Director of External Affairs at StepChange Debt Charity, said: “We welcome Ofgem’s move to suspend the forced installation of prepayment meters (PPMs), but it’s clear that thousands of households have been struggling with energy bills for some time now, which is evident in our own client data.

“For the people that have already been moved onto PPMs, there must be better protection to prevent self-disconnection and extreme energy rationing.”


Updated, 16 February 2023: This story has been amended to include fresh data obtained through freedom of information law on the number of complaints notified to Ofgem between 2018 and 2022. Previously, it just contained data for 10 months of 2022.

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Continue ReadingOfgem ignored 700,000 debt complaints before British Gas scandal

openDemocracy’s corruption revelations see UK plunge in global ranking

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Original article republished from Open |Democracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Government rule breaches are to blame for UK’s corruption nadir, says Transparency International

Image of Elmo and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson
Image of Elmo and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson

openDemocracy’s revelations of corruption in UK public life have been cited in a damning new index that ranks perceptions of Britain’s transparency at an all-time low.

A ‘poll of polls’ by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) found industry experts think the UK is more corrupt than ever.

The UK’s CPI score is based on data from eight independent sources including the Economist Intelligence Unit and the World Economic Forum, who surveyed experts and business executives for their views on abuses of public office for private gain and bribery in the UK.

Britain scored 73 this year, down from 78 in 2022, on a scale where zero means a country is perceived as highly corrupt and 100 means it is perceived as very clean. The NGO cited several pieces of journalism by openDemocracy as partial explanation for the slump, which saw the UK tumble in the global rankings from 11th to 18th.

They include revelations in November 2021 that former Tory Party treasurers appeared to be guaranteed peerages so long as they donated more than £3m to the party.

The NGO also pointed to 40 potential breaches of the ministerial code in the last five years that were not investigated as another factor likely contributing to the UK’s fall in the rankings.

openDemocracy was cited as revealing four of these breaches, one of which involved the government keeping large payments to the former prime minister Boris Johnson and other ministers secret for up to eight months. 

Other potential breaches discovered by this website include an MP failing to disclose that he owns a private PR company, and the blocking of Freedom of Information requests by a department that was then under Michael Gove’s watch.

Last year, the Cabinet Office insisted it would radically overhaul an ‘Orwellian’ government unit, almost two years after openDemocracy first revealed that it was vetting Freedom of Information requests.

Only five of the 180 countries assessed by Transparency for the 2022 Index saw their year-on-year scores drop by five or more points. The UK (-5) was joined by World Cup 2022 host Qatar (-5), Myanmar (-5), Azerbaijan (-7), and Oman (-8).

The countries perceived to be the least corrupt were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, while those ranked most corrupt were South Sudan, Syria and Somalia. 

Transparency International acknowledged that most countries at the bottom of its index were either currently experiencing conflict or had recently done so. It added that although most Western European countries had been ranked higher than African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries, they in fact played a central role in fostering global corruption.

“For decades, they have welcomed dirty money from abroad, allowing kleptocrats to increase their wealth, power and destructive geopolitical ambitions,” the report said.

Original article republished from Open |Democracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingopenDemocracy’s corruption revelations see UK plunge in global ranking

Revealed: Taskforce to tackle NHS backlog is stuffed with private health CEOs

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Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Lobbyists for private health corporations were among those tasked with shaping proposals for NHS recovery plan

Adam Bychawski 19 January 2023, 3.31pm

Sunak met with the CEOs of several UK private health corporations in Number 10 in December.
| No 10 Downing Street

Rishi Sunak hosted a meeting with seven bosses from the UK’s biggest private health companies to discuss how to tackle the NHS backlog, openDemocracy can reveal.

Campaigners have raised concerns that the close involvement of private healthcare corporations in the government’s response to the NHS crisis will benefit shareholders at the expense of public investment.

The government announced the creation of the Elective Recovery Taskforce in December to provide advice on how to “turbocharge NHS recovery from the pandemic, reduce waiting times for patients and eliminate waits for routine care of over a year by 2025”.

At the time, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) refused to give openDemocracy details of the group’s members, or say who had attended its launch at Number 10 led by the PM and health secretary Steve Barclay in December.

A guestlist for the event, obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request, reveals that half a dozen CEOs from private health firms were in attendance. 

Guests included the chief execs of the UK’s two largest private hospital operators: Paolo Pieri, the chief exec of Circle Health Group, and Justin Ash, who heads up Spire Healthcare. Also present was Jim Easton, the chief executive of Practice Plus Group, the NHS’s top private healthcare provider.

They were joined by David Hare, the chief executive of Independent Healthcare Provider Network, a lobby group that represents for-profit and not-for-profit private health organisations including Bupa and HCA, one of the biggest healthcare facility companies in the US.

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The private healthcare executives, which also included CEOs from Horder Healthcare, Newmedica, InHealth and Medefer, outnumbered the five NHS England directors invited to the event.

DHSC said it could not provide openDemocracy with minutes from the meeting because none were taken, and refused to share any papers handed out to attendees.

Separately, the government quietly published a list of members of the Elective Recovery Taskforce on Monday. The 16-person group includes DHSC ministers, six NHS bosses, and Hare.

Other members include Bill Morgan, a private healthcare lobbyist whose past clients included Virgin Care, who was appointed a Number 10 adviser in November, and Paul Manning, an NHS consultant surgeon who is also chief medical officer for Circle Healthcare.

The government said the role of the task force would be to “shape proposals for how the healthcare system can make use of all resources at its disposal, further tackling the backlog caused by the Covid-19 pandemic”. It will conclude its work in March.

Last week, the prime minister said he had signed up to an NHS GP after the Guardian reported that he had registered with a private clinic in west London that charges £250 for a consultation.

The British Medical Association warned last year that the government’s NHS recovery plan would significantly increase the outsourcing of services to private providers and that it “threatens the clinical and financial viability and sustainability of the NHS”.

Tony O’Sullivan, a retired consultant paediatrician and co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, told openDemocracy: “The head parasites are at the table to maximise future extraction of NHS funds.”

He added: “This is an important disclosure extracted from the government proving the direction of travel – to continue disinvesting in the NHS and increase its enforced dependence on private health care.

“The private sector was bailed out during Covid, has a lucrative four-year £10bn deal ongoing and is also in a position to earn massive profits from patients forced to go privately to avoid NHS queues of 7.2 million.”

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Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingRevealed: Taskforce to tackle NHS backlog is stuffed with private health CEOs

I’ve been an NHS nurse for 15 years. Here’s why I’m going on strike

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NHS sign
NHS nurses have voted to go on strike for the first time in their history

Original article republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

OPINION: As nurses announce strikes in December, the Tories must start paying them fairly to save the NHS from collapse

Holly Turner

25 November 2022, 12.00am

The first-ever national strikes of NHS nurses will take place on 15 and 20 December, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has announced.

The RCN, whose members made history by voting for direct action across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has accused the government of “choosing strike action” by refusing to negotiate on pay.

Other health unions, meanwhile, continue to ballot their members across both England and Wales, while strike mandates have been achieved across Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Direct action will now take place in all corners of the NHS, including ambulance services. These ballot results are evidence that there has been a dramatic shift in mood among health workers over the last year.

In 2021, I wrote for openDemocracy about a general feeling of despair among colleagues. By contrast, everyone now appears angry and focused, a feeling that I think has been encouraged by the recent wave of strike and trade union activity across other industries.

We hear reports of the NHS in crisis, hospitals running at capacity and dangerously low staffing levels. But without working within these services, it’s impossible to truly understand what this looks like for staff, and the patients these staff are doing their best to care for.

What staff are witnessing first hand is a catastrophic breakdown of services that has left us with vacancies hitting 135,000 and patients in danger. We desperately need to focus on retention of staff: without addressing that, we have no chance of tackling the backlog of seven million patients. Sadly, neither the government or opposition ever bring retention into the conversation, because that would mean putting pay restoration on the agenda.

In a recent survey by the GMB union, one in three ambulance staff said they had been involved in a delay that had resulted in a person dying. This is a terrifying statistic, and just one of many that the government should be taking far more seriously.

Staff are not prepared to stand with their hands behind their backs while the NHS is ripped apart in front of our eyes

What we are now witnessing are increasingly extreme attacks from the right-wing press and commentators attempting to demonise us, and to guilt us into abandoning our fight for what we are owed.

However, as I commented to a colleague, nothing they can say about us will be as bad as what staff are witnessing day in, day out. Things cannot continue as they are, and staff are not prepared to stand with their hands behind their backs while the NHS is ripped apart in front of our eyes.

I have worked as an NHS nurse for 15 years. I love my job. But my pay, and that of my colleagues, has been deliberately eroded for over a decade, with some workers up to 29% worse off in real terms. What we are left with is a group of workers carrying the entire burden of keeping patients safe, while the government washes its hands of any responsibility or accountability for the state of the service within which they work.

These are the staff who find themselves skipping breaks, working overtime for free, selling back their annual leave to make ends meet, sleeping in their cars as they cannot afford fuel to and from work – and ultimately quitting, as the moral injury of delivering substandard care is not sustainable.

We should all be united in our outrage. While this is an industrial dispute about pay, the fight is about so much more. During the pandemic we witnessed the devastating impact of dramatically increased demand on an NHS that has been stripped to the bone. We cannot let this happen again.

This is why we are taking our fight to this government and standing up not only for ourselves, but for our families and communities, and for the future of the NHS. So when the time comes, and it will, please join NHS staff on the picket lines.

Without action now, there will be no NHS left to fight for.

Original article republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Continue ReadingI’ve been an NHS nurse for 15 years. Here’s why I’m going on strike

Policing bill: MPs have one last chance to protect the right to protest

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/mps-have-one-last-chance-to-protect-the-right-to-protest/

MPs are preparing to vote next week on some of the most controversial anti-protest measures left in the government’s notorious policing bill.

Amnesty UK has urged MPs to “follow the lead of their colleagues in the Lords in taking a stand against the power-grab” when the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill returns to the Commons on Monday.

Last month, the House of Lords rejected a string of proposals that would have given police in England and Wales increased powers, including the power to stop and search anyone at a protest “without suspicion”.

Karla McLaren, Amnesty UK’s government and political relations manager, told openDemocracy: “The right to protest is a cherished part of the fabric of our society and it’s profoundly disturbing that the government is trying to gag people like this.

Continue ReadingPolicing bill: MPs have one last chance to protect the right to protest

What nationalising energy companies would cost – and how to do it

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UK could bring National Grid and retailers in-house and build public renewable energy, says ex-Labour policy chief

Andrew Fisher

17 August 2022, 12.01am

Image of banknotes and a prepayment meter key by Lydia, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

When 62% of Conservative voters want energy run in the public sector, it’s fair to say the left has won the argument (75% of Labour voters agree, 68% of Lib Dems).

Yet public ownership is opposed passionately by the Conservative government, while the leader of the opposition has said he is “not in favour” of it – despite his election on a platform that committed to “bring rail, mail, water and energy into public ownership to end the great privatisation rip-off and save you money on your fares and bills”.

Public ownership is on the media’s radar, too. When Labour leader Keir Starmer announced his policy to freeze bills this week, he was asked why he wouldn’t also nationalise energy, replying that: “In a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills … the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.”

But so long as energy remains privatised, every single penny won’t. Billions of pennies will keep going to shareholders instead.

The energy market was fractured under the mass privatisations of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. It contains three sectors: producers or suppliers (those that produce energy), retailers (those that sell you energy), and distribution or transmission (the infrastructure that transports energy to your home).

It is important to bear this in mind when we’re talking about taking energy into public ownership. We need to be clear about what we want in public ownership and why.

By 2019, Labour had a detailed plan on how to do this – worked up by the teams around then shadow business and energy secretary Rebecca Long Bailey and then shadow chancellor John McDonnell. The plan is not the only way, but it illustrates what exists and how one could go about re-establishing a public energy ecosystem, run for people not profit.

The recent TUC report shows the cost of nationalising the ‘Big 5’ energy retailers – British Gas, E.ON, EDF, Scottish Power and Ovo – to be £2.8bn, which would go on buying all the companies’ shares. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to more than the annual budget of the Sure Start programme in 2009/10 (its peak year). But it’s a one-off cost, not an annual one.

And it’s not like the current privatised system doesn’t have its costs: since June 2021, the UK government has spent £2.7bn bailing out 28 energy companies that collapsed because they put short-term profits ahead of long-term stability – companies like Bulb Energy. We have spent billions of pounds already to get nothing in return. So £2.8bn is not a large amount of money to pay to gain these assets, rather than just bailing them out.

The big energy retail companies made £23bn in dividends between 2010 and 2020 according to Common Wealth, and £43bn if you include share buy-backs. What you choose to do with that surplus in public ownership is another matter: you could use it to invest in new clean energy or to lower bills or fund staff pay rises, rather than subject your workers to fire-and-rehire practices as British Gas did last year.

Labour’s previous plan also involved taking the distribution networks – the National Grid – into public ownership. This would end the profiteering at this level, too – with £13bn paid out in dividends over the five years prior to 2019. As Long Bailey said at the time, we need “public driven and coordinated action, without which we simply will not be able to tackle climate change”. Like previous nationalisations, the purchase of the grid and distribution networks could be achieved by swapping shares for government bonds. By international accounting standards, the cost is fiscally neutral as the state gains a revenue-generating asset, which more than pays for the bond yield.

The final part of the plan – and the most complicated – is production and supply. It would be impossible to nationalise the oilfields of Saudi Arabia or Qatar – and for good reasons we should want to leave fossil fuels in the ground, anyway, rather than contest their ownership.

And so what Labour proposed in 2019 was a mass investment in new renewable energy generation projects, with the public sector taking a stake and returning profits to the public. For example, under the ‘People’s Power Plan’, we proposed 37 new offshore wind farms with a 51% public stake, delivering 52GW alone by 2030, equivalent to 38 coal power stations. There were additional proposals for onshore wind, solar, and tidal schemes, as part of a 10-year £250bn Green Transformation Fund, which included other schemes like the Warm Homes insulation initiative.

Labour’s new shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised a similar level of investment – a £28bn a year climate investment pledge.

Any surplus energy would then be sold on international markets, with a People’s Power Fund – a sort of sovereign wealth fund – to deliver public investment in local communities’ social infrastructure: a genuine levelling-up fund, perhaps.

Many people will say this can’t be done, but of course it has been before. The 1945 Attlee government nationalised energy and successive Conservative governments – including those of Churchill, MacMillan and Heath – were happy to have a nationalised asset. Harold MacMillan famously accused Margaret Thatcher of “selling off the family silver” when she privatised state industries.

When I was born in 1979, the National Coal Board, British Gas and British Petroleum were all publicly-owned or majority publicly-owned companies. Between them, they were the major suppliers of our energy. Our gas bills came from British Gas and our electricity bills from our regional electricity board (in my case Seeboard, the South Eastern Electricity Board), and coal and oil fuelled our power stations.

The regional electricity boards had been brought into being by the Attlee government’s Electricity Act 1947, when electricity companies were forcibly merged into regional area boards and nationalised. The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 and the Gas Act 1948 had together brought energy into public ownership.

Seeboard was privatised in 1990, and later became part of EDF Energy – ironically, the nationalised French energy company, whose profits from the UK’s stupidity are used to subsidise French consumers.

The French government has now fully nationalised EDF (previously it was 84% publicly owned), and household energy bills rose by just 4% this year – compared to over 50% in the UK and a forecast 200% by January 2023.

If Starmer doesn’t want to listen to me (or his own commitments from 2020), perhaps emulating the centrist Emmanuel Macron in this instance would be palatable?

From the depletion of fish stocks to the burning of the Amazon, profit has proved a failed regulator for use of our natural resources

In his later years, Robin Cook argued: “The market is incapable of respecting a common resource such as the environment, which provides no price signal to express the cost of its erosion nor to warn of the long-term dangers of its destruction.”

From the depletion of fish stocks to the burning of the Amazon, profit has proved a failed regulator for use of our natural resources. The market has also failed to decarbonise at pace, or to end the scourge of fuel poverty.

On the media this week, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband said Labour is “continuing to look at what the right long-term solution is for our energy system”. It is up to all of us to campaign for that solution to be public ownership – whether that’s from within the Labour Party (like me) or from the outside.

Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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Continue ReadingWhat nationalising energy companies would cost – and how to do it