IT is disturbing to read that a subsidiary company is to be set-up at Airedale Hospital with initial costs estimated at £400,000-plus – £400,000 hit on the public purse (Keighley News, January 4).

The effect of this will be to destabilise and fragment the service and to ripen plans for future privatisation, not today or next year but when it is felt expedient to do so.

Airedale NHS Foundation Trust says information about the changes and costs is commercially sensitive, but is this not secrecy masquerading as confidentiality when the values and ideas behind these proposals will have implications for the public as service users, and would appear to envisage a situation where staff conditions will be different for those doing the same work?

I worry that the destabilisation of the service, together with lack of adequate resources for health services, will eventually lead to a call for privatisation of the NHS as a whole.

It will destroy the co-operative nature of our health service and leave us all vulnerable to the vagaries of market forces at a time when we are most in need of support.

Austerity will be the order of the day for those who are unable to pay.

All organisations such as the NHS are subject to change brought about by changing circumstances. What is needed is considered and objective change.

It is nearly 40 years since a royal commission reported on the state of the NHS. Recently Lord Maurice Saatchi, a Conservative grandee, advocated a further royal commission. Such bodies have in the past had their membership drawn impartially from all interested parties and if this was the case, a new royal commission would be welcome.

JOHN COPE Former treasurer, Airedale Health Authority