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For many years the European Commission, by and large, stayed out of interfering in the NHS. It was assumed that this was politically too sensitive and in those days the Commission was not obsessed with market reform. The EU market was always open to exceptions, perhaps the most famous being the French railway system, where Paris never accepted EU intervention.
In 2006 Labour commissioned a legal opinion on the effect of EU legislation on the NHS. The Health Department’s then commercial director, Ken Anderson, who had been involved with independent surgical treatment centres (ISTCs), told the Financial Times in January 2007: ‘My personal conviction is that once you open up NHS services to competition, the ability to shut that down or call it back passes out of your hands. At some point European law will take over and prevail … In my opinion, we are at that stage now.’ As if recognising the truth of this interpretation on 13 December 2007, with not much publicity, the Department of Health issued a document titled Principles and Rules for Cooperation and Competition, running through which are EU legal positions which have become the law in the UK.
