Labour’s shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, has promised that a Labour government will repeal the coalition government’s health reforms, which, he said, have heralded “NHS privatisation at a pace and scale never seen before.”

In his speech to the Labour Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday 3 October, Burnham said that, as part of “Cameron’s great NHS carve up,” 398 NHS community services in England, worth more than £250m (€310m; $400m), were out to tender.

“Contracts are being signed in the single biggest act of privatisation the NHS has ever seen,” he said, with at least 37 private sector bidders among the contract winners. Those awarded the contracts were “not the choice of GPs, who we were told would be in …