By Richard Johnstone | 8 June 2012
NHS staff have been urged to bid for a share of a £19m pot to help them set up mutual companies to provide health services.
The money will be made available in the next year for frontline workers to create their own social enterprises, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced yesterday.
Around 6,000 social enterprises have been established from within the health service in the past five years, since the Department of Health became the first Whitehall department to give staff rights to form mutuals. Already, £100m has been invested in these firms following the previous government’s Right to Request scheme, which launched in June 2008.
Department of Health civil servants who led the Right to Request programme will now join the Cabinet Office to help introduce similar reforms across Whitehall.
Announcing the extra funding, Lansley said social enterprises were able to harness innovations and provide services that ‘greatly help patients’.
He added: ‘The NHS is full of people with new ideas about giving patients the care they need. We have already seen 6,000 social enterprises within the NHS offering staff more freedom and giving patients more tailored health care. The extra funding announced today will help roll out more of these services across the health service and shift power and control to frontline workers.’
The government set up a mutuals taskforce in February 2011 to encourage public sector staff to form a social enterprise. Earlier this month, the first awards were made from the government’s £10m mutual support programme, which was created to help mutuals access professional support.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said there was ‘a real pent-up frustration among frontline public servants, who are fed up with constraints imposed by the monolith within which they are imprisoned’.
He added that the government would continue to spread the example of NHS mutuals across the public sector.
‘Spinning out into a mutual gives them a chance to do things in ways they know are best. Now is the time for entrepreneurial public servants to take the initiative and push for ownership,’ said Maude.
The Employee Ownership Association welcomed the move to integrate the government’s work on public sector mutuals.
Chief executive Iain Hasdell said: ‘It is both the latest part of the infrastructure needed to support the emerging growth in such spin-outs, and a good time to reflect on the opportunities there are within some parts of the public sector for entrepreneurial managers and staff to create new businesses in which there is full or a high degree of employee ownership.’
