Good links thanks, and I'll add: the % of NHS's budget being pushed to private providers has been steadily increasing every year for over a decade. If you have £x to pay nurses (or CT scanning machine operating costs, or cleaning crews, or...) and nurses typical pay is £y, and your budget goes up to £2x but you also switch to using agency nurses who charge £3y while paying the nurses £1.5y, the nurses have had a 50% pay rise, but the NHS budget is effectively worth 2/3rds what it was before despite being technically double.

Obviously it's not as simple as X and 2X, but constant real-term pay drops have led to lower staff levels leading to more agency staffing (where a private company takes a tidy slice of profit for every hour worked), policies such as selling off NHS buildings for NHS Trusts to have to rent them back have been put in place, and shit like that has happened across the board.

Ultimately, the tory party hates that the NHS is public not privately run, have gradually been pushing to change that, and have excellent PR that's persuaded many people that it's the useless NHS's fault for all of this. Those pesky doctors who don't care about people!