LAST week I received 350 or so emails from constituents who subscribe to the 38 Degrees website, asking me not to vote to privatise the NHS.

Not that I, or anyone else for that matter, has any such plans.

Indeed, the only politician I can think of in recent years who advocated such a thing was Nigel Farage, who wanted to replace the NHS with an insurance-based system. Now, however, even he says he has changed his mind. I think the story of the NHS in the lifetime of this Parliament has not been one of creeping privatisation but rather of reduced bureaucratisation. Let the key statistic that defines how the NHS has changed since 2010 be this: we have been able to afford 8,000 more doctors and 5,600 more nurses (more nurses and midwives now than ever before in the NHS) because we have 19,000 fewer administrators and managers.

The reason all those emails came last week was because there was a private member’s bill last Friday to amend the Government’s Health and Social Care Act, for which they were seeking support.

The bill purports to prevent “privatisation” that simply isn’t happening. It isn’t happening because there were no new competition provisions in the Health and Social Care Act. On the contrary, the law has been changed so that NHS commissioners cannot pursue competition in the NHS if it is not in the interests of patients.

In the past some contracts with the private sector guaranteed levels of income to independent sector treatment centres regardless of the amount of work they actually carried out – that can’t happen now. The reality is that private sector provision in the NHS grew at twice the rate under the last government than under this one.

Personally, I have nothing whatsoever against the NHS commissioning services from the private sector so long as two conditions are met: firstly, that the service is free to the patient; and secondly that ownership of the treatment, and liability for anything that goes wrong, remains with the NHS. I do not believe that NHS patients should be denied the best and most convenient treatment if that treatment happens to come from the private sector. In fact, many patients enjoy private sector treatment at NHS walk-in centres without knowing it, because it says NHS on the door, which is quite right, because the NHS is paying the bill. We need to keep a sense of proportion, however, because for every pound spent by the NHS, only 6p is spent with private sector providers.

What the private member’s bill would do is to stop local doctors making decisions about the best services for their patients. Clinical leadership, unlike political or bureaucratic leadership, is highly valued in the NHS – but this bill seriously undermines it.What the reforms of the last three years have actually done is to remove layers of bureaucracy, including the old strategic health authorities and primary care trust organisations, saving us £5.5 billion in this parliament and £1.5 billion per year thereafter. Together with the extra £12 billion that we have put into the NHS, we have been able to afford to recruit additional frontline staff: hence the statistic that there are now 19,000 fewer “managers” and 8,000 more doctors and 5,600 more nurses on our wards compared to 2010. All these extra clinical staff account for the fact that the NHS has carried out nearly one million more operations per year, performed millions more diagnostic tests and referred 51 per cent more patients for cancer treatment than was previously possible.

The NHS has become a lot more productive, which is why international organisations have judged it the best health service in the world. If we are to keep it that way, we will have to provide ever more funding to keep up with new drugs, new treatments, and an older population. Ultimately, therefore, a strong NHS depends upon a strong economy, which is why we need to stick to the economic plan and keep the economy going in the right direction.