Richard Branson’s Virgin Care has hoovered up £2bn worth of NHS contracts over the past five years. This should get the pulse rate of rightwing ideologues racing, and they will no doubt gleefully point to Virgin’s rhetoric about how these contracts have “saved the NHS and local authorities millions”. They will also undoubtedly trumpet the company’s claim that they have made no profit from these contracts and that Branson has said he will put any dividends he receives from these contracts back into the NHS. Heartwarming indeed.

But we need a second opinion; an alternative diagnosis. Branson may not seek personal gain from his private healthcare contracts, but it is clear that ideologically driven privatisation of public services is primarily concerned with the bottom line. The damning 100-page report by MPs earlier this year into the dramatic failure of Carillion, the private company that managed huge government construction projects as well as services ranging from school meals to NHS cleaning, summarised the company’s business model as “a relentless dash for cash”.

But is this a wise business tactic? Virgin need look no further than its own railway contracts to know how easily this private model can hit the buffers. Earlier this year the east coast mainline was brought back under government control, following the failure of franchise operators Stagecoach and Virgin Trains to get their sums rights. But in a clear example of the private-good, public-bad mentality that has blinded all governments in recent decades, this was the third time in a just over a decade that the government called in the East Coast franchise. Following the collapse of GNER in 2007 and National Express East Coast in 2009 it was taken back in-house and run as a not-for-private-profit outfit.

During this time the route generated a surplus for the Treasury and achieved the highest passenger satisfaction level of any long-distance franchise. But to ensure that public ownership never succeeds for long, the Tories privatised the route again, handing it to Virgin Trains and Stagecoach. As the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “Privatisation broke it. Public ownership fixed it. And now privatisation has broken it again.” 

But what of the NHS? Is this any different – can the private sector, as the ideologues and Virgin Care claim, improve patient and employee satisfaction and save the NHS and local authorities millions? Perhaps the head of Virgin Care, Bart Johnson, can answer that. He was recently forced to apologise personally to staff in Bath following the company’s failures after they took charge of community health and care services in Bath and North East Somerset. Patients had appointments cancelled, letters and reports were not sent out, and nurses had problems updating patient records during the first months of the private contact. Virgin Care staff were even asked to “hold off” reporting their safety concerns to the health watchdog, despite having a legal obligation to do so if they feel their service is unsafe.

As for the company’s commitment to save the NHS and local authorities millions, suing NHS England and a county council is hardly the way to achieve this. In November 2016 Virgin Care sued six clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) after losing an £82m contract for children’s services to a rival bid involving a local NHS trust and two social enterprises. To settle, the CCGs paid Virgin an undisclosed sum.

With a responsive government and evidence-driven policy one would think the disastrous collapse of Carillion, the failings so evident in our privatised rail network, not to mention the total mess privatisation has made of the probation service, would have led to a pause and a rethink of the entire privatisation agenda. But research in 2014 showed that a fifth of ministers in the coalition government had links to private health companies, including both Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt, we may be waiting a while.

Meanwhile, the NHS continues as a battleground; a war in which we know the public is overwhelmingly on one side and government ideologues and corporations like Virgin on the other. This is a battle between a publicly funded, publicly provided health service and a healthcare system viewed as a market for the private sector. The public must win this war, which is why Greens strongly back the campaign for NHS reinstatement to roll back the “internal market”, end contracting, and return the NHS to purely public provision. If we fail, corporations like Virgin will be left running our health service.

• Molly Scott Cato is Green party speaker on economy and finance and spokeswoman for EU relations