If you’re not taking Wes Streeting’s NHS consultation seriously – don’t! That’s the advice from people who ought to know.

Apparently the “national conversation” on the future of the health service has descended into farce very quickly, with suggestions including “put beer on tap in hospitals” and “put Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta in charge”.

Health Secretary Streeting himself tried to get in on the jokes when he said a recommendation for a Wetherspoons pub in every hospital had been “sadly vetoed by the chancellor”.

Perhaps he more happily stepped back from the idea of being fired from a cannon in a bid to raise funds, while some of us may be more unhappy that the idea of replacing him with a dog has also disappeared from the consultation’s website.

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But this is exactly what we should expect, according to Richard Murphy of Funding the Future. In a recent article about the consultation, he told us

we know that anything that contradicts the findings that Streeting wants it to reach will be ignored.

Instead, he said, Streeting would want the consultation to support two projects:

He is talking about establishing a ‘neighbourhood health service’ where all GPs, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists, health visitors and mental health specialists will be located under the same roof. In other words, he is trying to establish the so-called Darzi centres that were a disaster under New Labour and were wisely and very quickly abandoned. The worst thing about them was they were not in the neighbourhood at all, but had to be located away from where people lived to find suitable premises. They are, however, ripe for privatisation, and that suits Wes Streeting’s plans very well indeed.

Streeting is talking about creating digital NHS passports for people, with all data stored in one place. The security risks are high, but Wes won’t worry about that. The whole purpose of this is to sell all that data to life science companies who can then sell the NHS all the drugs that the person needs to be on to supposedly prevent diseases.

Sure enough, making full medical records available on the NHS app is one of the top suggestions at the moment.

If you still want to register your own views, you can do it by going to change.NHS.uk or the NHS app. The consultation will be open until the start of next year, with a final version of the government’s 10-year plan expected to be published in spring 2025.

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