The Tories won’t deliver a 7-day a week NHS, they’ll cut it

With forty days to go, David Cameron is desperate to run away from his dismal record on the NHS. After five years in Downing Street, he stood in Manchester today and had the cheek to make all the same promises on a seven-day NHS.

No-one will be taken in by it. People know that not only did this Government not deliver a seven-day NHS, they spent five years taking it backwards. It’s now harder to get a GP appointment from Monday to Friday, nevermind the weekend. A quarter of us waited a week or more for an appointment last time we tried.

NHS doctors and nurses were quick to see through the ‘new’ promise too. One of the country’s most senior GPs, Dr Mark Porter of the British Medical Association, said the announcement was “at best an empty pledge and at worst shameless political game playing ahead of the election.”

David Cameron’s plans are simply not credible without the extra staff the NHS needs so it has time to care. Labour will invest £2.5 billion extra each year from a mansion tax to recruit 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs and guarantee appointments within 48 hours.

On Thursday, a report from the independent King’s Fund think tank catalogued David Cameron’s failings on the NHS – a deficit of £800 million, longer waits for cancer care, at A&E and to see a GP. It labelled his £3 billion NHS re-organisation – that he ruled out in 2010 – “damaging and distracting”.

This record alone is enough to deny him five more years. But the Tories’ extreme plans, set out in the Budget, for spending cuts in the next Parliament mean they cannot protect the NHS. It will continue to head downhill rapidly. That’s why Thursday 7 May will be David Cameron’s day of reckoning on the NHS. Labour has a better plan to restore it with the funding it craves, the staff it desperate needs and a return to the high standards patients expect.

Andrew Gwynne is the MP for Denton and Reddish and is part of Labour’s Shadow Health Team