Update: breakthrough

Well, that was quick! Yesterday afternoon 38 Degrees members started to contact the government body Monitor to tell them that we don’t want private health companies to be given tax breaks. It worked. Monitor quickly changed their tune and announced:

“…Monitor will not be recommending that private sector providers should be exempt from paying corporation tax.”

That was a swift turnaround from the beginning of the day, when Monitor had refused to rule out this tax break:

“We have had responses and held detailed conversations with providers from all sectors and we are taking time to analyse the evidence before drawing our final conclusions.”

That’s a brilliant breakthrough. People power is working to outweigh the lobbying pressure of the big private health companies! By working together, we’ve ruled out a tax break which the private health industry had spent months lobbying for.

The office team phoned Monitor last night to confirm their change of position. They were clearly taken aback by the number of 38 Degrees members contacting them – and they were keen to know what they had to do to get us to stop putting them under pressure!

So far Monitor have only promised in writing to rule out exemptions from Corporation Tax. The 38 Degrees office is still waiting to receive a clear commitment that they’ll rule out any other new perks for private health companies. So we can’t stop just yet.

Join other 38 Degrees members and send a quick email to Monitor thanking them for changing their position and asking them to rule out all tax breaks for private health companies.

But before you do that, please take a moment to celebrate this amazing breakthrough. There’s so much more to do if we’re going to protect our NHS. It looks like we’ve seen off a terrible proposal which could have made things much worse. We did it because we all work together.