The ICB is the body controlling healthcare spend and policy in Merseyside and Cheshire, one of 40+ such organisations across the country.

To: Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board

We are residents of Cheshire and Merseyside, who use the NHS and are strongly in support of its founding principles as a comprehensive and universal system of healthcare, publicly provided, publicly accountable, publicly funded through taxation, free at the point of need, with decisions on treatment taken on clinical grounds without regard to ability to pay.

We note the Board’s strategy to carry out £58m CIPs (Cost Improvement Plans = cuts) this year, and for the various NHS Trusts and Foundation Trusts to achieve (i.e. cut) a further £331m in CIPs in an already crisis-ridden service. The Board’s own reports indicate how severely poverty affects health and healthcare affects poverty. Such cuts represent a danger to life and limb in our communities.

We are writing to you as members of the Integrated Care Board which has responsibility for the functioning and budgets of the NHS in our region, to raise issues of public accountability and transparency.

We call on you as a matter of urgency to:

1) rescind the plan, announced by the Chair during the 27 July Board meeting, to hold unspecified but regular meetings of the Board in private;

2) ensure, in line with the ICB Constitution (clause 7.3.1), that all meetings of the Integrated Care Board are held in public unless there is a specific resolution to “exclude the public on the grounds that it is believed to not be in the public interest”. In any such case, we call on you to publish the resolution and the reasons why the specific meeting cannot be held in public;

3) ensure that Board papers for each meeting of the Integrated Care Board are published a week in advance of the meeting so that the public has time to read them and submit questions within the deadline;

4) publish a full list of members of all committees and subcommittees of the ICB, and of all bodies receiving delegated powers from the ICB;

5) publish regular reports from all committees and subcommittees of the ICB, and of all bodies receiving delegated powers from the ICB.

We regard these as minimum standards for transparency and democracy.

This has been signed by more than one hundred people.