• SADLY, Whittington Hospital’s chief executive at a public meeting was unable to respond to enormous community concern and anger about the secretive partnership deal with Ryhurst, part of Rydon, the Grenfell Tower cladding contractor.

The hospital board is happy to give Rydon great powers over invaluable NHS hospital real estate for a “development” strategy with an asset-stripping sale.

This is our NHS inheritance and is much needed for the future of the community’s health. It cannot be justified to wrap it up in a new-style private finance initiative arrangement.

The taxpayer is to subsidise Rydon out of NHS resources badly needed for patient care. But not if public opinion and outrage prevail.

The board would have the public believe that this is a contract unique in history.

Like all hospitals, the Whittington has been starved of funds. Government policy is forcing the sale of more than £5billion of NHS property nationally to finance hospital repairs via strategic estate partnerships. Is the Whittington to be the sole exception?

The board says it will not be selling our Whittington assets – yet has no other means of rewarding Rydon. And somehow, against all experience, the board will be in total control over a highly complex contract not subject to public scrutiny. All this is not credible.

It all looks murky, incompetent and utterly desperate. An open independent investigation of the Rydon deal is needed before NHS England finalises the contract.

If, as the board insists, it wants to work with the community then it should support the call for more publicly funded and qualified and properly-paid staff, and more beds – for NHS patients only. NHS staff, beds and facilities should not be used for private insurance care.

The board should support the call for immediate full public funding of patient care, not taxpayers’ funding of marketing in the NHS, with an army of hugely-expensive management consultants, contract managers, lawyers, accountants and administrators taking away many billions each year from patient services.

To be true to its values, the NHS cannot be about competition, secret deals, subsidising private profits and dividends, suing the taxpayer over lost contracts, and walking away from caring for patients as the inefficient market has shown here and in the USA.

Chronic underfunding and the deliberate breaking down of the public NHS under the 2012 Health and Social Care Act have left hospitals high and dry.

Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are driving deep and dangerous cuts throughout the NHS, including around £900million worth of cuts in North Central London NHS, covering Camden, Islington, Haringey, Enfield and Barnet.

STPs have been largely discredited. Now Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs), which are American commercial insurance-based systems, are the new demolition tool of those in charge of what is left of the public NHS.

Judicial reviews are being launched to challenge health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s and NHS head Simon Stevens’s right to impose ACOs.

Will the Whittington board support a return to an NHS for the people, by the people, of the people? Or support the usurpers of the NHS name, who are taking us backwards to dark times of poor or no health care for the majority?

The Whittington community is helping to lead the way for a restoration of the best value for money and most equitable health care system in the world. The one with a unique, caring, professional ethos and practice. The true fully public NHS.

I would ask the hospital board: please join in.

SHARON LYTTON, N6