BOURNEMOUTH, Oct 1: British Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered a setback on Wednesday when delegates at his Labour Party’s annual conference voted against his controversial proposals for hospital reform.

The show-of-hands vote is not binding on Blair, who has already indicated that his government will press ahead with plans to grant management autonomy to selected state-run hospitals and create so-called “foundation hospitals”.

But observers said the motion — which calls on Blair’s government to withdraw legislation that would set up the new hospitals — will give fresh ammunition to those who oppose the idea.

It is feared that foundation hospitals — with the right to hire their own staff and manage their own assets — will compromise the free-care-for-all principle that underpins Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

Wednesday’s resolution was put forth by Unison, Britain’s biggest public sector union.

“The policy on foundation hospitals is contrary to the party’s stated manifesto commitment in 1997 to end the internal market and ‘put the NHS back together’,” the motion said.

“It is a policy drawn from nowhere with no prior discussion in the party structures and no reference in the 2001 manifesto” on which Blair’s government was re-elected, it said.

The motion was carried despite a robust defence of the reforms by Health Secretary John Reid, who told delegates that foundation hospitals were part of the government’s “biggest ever campaign against illness and pain”.

Earlier in the day, during a visit to a hospital in Bournemouth, Blair expressed confidence that his critics would eventually be won over.

“When you do these things you get some opposition at the beginning but usually that opposition falls away towards the end,” he said.

Set up in the wake of World War II, the NHS is the world’s biggest health care organisation with more than one million employees in England alone.

But it has been plagued by years of underfunding, a lack of doctors and nurses, and long waiting lists for operations, while hospitals must function under the direct control of the health ministry.

Britain also has private clinics, and several NHS hospitals operate private wings, but the fees which they charge are prohibitively high for most of the public.—AFP