Stephen Hester spent much of June saying no. First £5.60 a share, then £6.50, both rejected by the easyJet board as an insult to an airline carrying more passengers than at any point in its history. The response had shifted by Sunday night. Castlelake, a private equity firm from Minneapolis better known for leasing jet engines than running airlines, had reached £6.90, and easyJet said it was minded to accept. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, still retaining over fifteen per cent of the corporation he established, stood to gain close to £800m. The airline he built would leave the London market it has traded on since 2000.

There is a familiar shape to this story now. A British company trades below what its board believes it is worth, a foreign buyer with patient capital arrives, and after some resistance a deal gets done that removes another name from the FTSE 250. EasyJet joins a list that has grown long enough this year to stop feeling like news and start feeling like a pattern. What makes the pattern worth NHS attention is not easyJet itself, which has no bearing on health policy, but the mechanism underneath it, because that same mechanism has already reached into the NHS estate.

In April, KKR and Stonepeak, a pair of American investors, agreed to buy Assura for £1.61bn. Assura owns more than six hundred healthcare buildings, many of them GP surgeries whose rent comes straight out of NHS commissioning budgets. The board recommended the deal after turning down a rival bid from a UK-listed competitor, judging the American offer better for shareholders. It was, by every normal test of corporate governance, a rational decision. It also meant that buildings housing primary care for millions of patients, with rents guaranteed by the state and immune to the usual commercial risks that discipline a landlord, passed into the hands of investors whose horizon is measured in exit multiples rather than decades of service continuity.

Peers raised the obvious question in the Lords soon after. What happens to a GP surgery's rent, its maintenance schedule, its willingness to fund alterations for a growing patient list, once ownership sits with a fund answerable to institutional investors thousands of miles away. The government's answer was procedural rather than strategic: leases continue on their existing terms regardless of who owns the freehold, and the district valuer will keep an eye on rents. That is accurate, and it is also irrelevant. Nobody in Whitehall has set out what kind of ownership the NHS estate can tolerate before service resilience becomes a function of a private equity fund's return schedule rather than public health need.

The pattern extends further than property. Community health contracts worth well over a billion pounds now sit with companies backed by the same kind of capital, diagnostics and ambulance services among them. Social care already lived through this experiment once, when Southern Cross and then Four Seasons collapsed under debt loads their owners had layered on to extract returns, leaving councils to pick up residents with nowhere else to go. Nobody planned for that outcome either. It simply followed from treating care homes as an asset class rather than a public commitment, until the commitment came due and the asset class had moved on.

EasyJet's shareholders will vote on their own commercial logic, and nobody should mourn low-cost aviation slipping out of London listing rules. But the government has still not answered the question the Assura sale posed plainly. If ownership of GP premises, community contracts and ambulance services can shift to overseas private capital purely because domestic markets undervalue the assets, ministers need a considered view on which parts of the health system that arrangement can absorb and which it cannot. Waiting for a Southern policy entails waiting for a subsequent Southern policy.  It is an admission that none exists.