Streeting: NHS elective recovery plan “falls well short” of backlog challenge

Wes Streeting has criticised the NHS elective recovery plan announced by Sajid Javid today, saying it “falls well short” of the scale of the challenge presented by record treatment backlogs caused by both Tory cuts and Covid.

Speaking in the House of Commons today, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary said the plan failed to include a strategy for tackling “the workforce crisis” in the NHS. He highlighted that there are currently 93,000 staffing vacancies in the NHS.

“No plan to deal with delayed discharges and no hope of eliminating waits of more than a year before the general election in 2024. I wonder if they’ll be putting that on their election leaflets,” the Labour frontbencher said.

“The only big new idea seems to be a website that tells people they’re waiting a long time, as if they didn’t already know.” Streeting added that the plan amounted to “a series of re-announcements” that would not do enough to tackle NHS problems.

“It is understaffed, overworked and, if he’s not careful, he will lose more people than he is able to recruit,” Streeting said of the NHS. He remarked that the proposal of new NHS reservists appeared to be “more Dad’s Army than SAS”.

Javid has admitted that, under the plan, NHS hospital waiting lists for elective care are not expected to fall for at least another two years. “I wonder if they’ll be putting that on their election leaflets,” Streeting quipped today.

The Health Secretary has promised that 99% of patients will wait less than one year for treatment by March 2024 and vowed to cut waiting lists to under a year by 2025. He said long-waiting patients would be offered “greater choice”.

Javid announced in his statement today that the use of community diagnostic centres and surgical hubs would be expanded. “We welcome those, but the Secretary of State cannot pretend that they meet the scale of the challenge,” Streeting said.

Reports have suggested that the Treasury refused to sign off the NHS backlog plans in a last-minute intervention over the weekend. Javid has denied that this was the case, claiming instead that the Omicron variant had caused the delay.

In an urgent question about the delay on Monday, Streeting said Javid had sent a junior minister to answer it because he was “still recovering from the embarrassment of the media round” in which “the big announcement was, literally, that there is no announcement”.

Below is the full text of Wes Streeting’s response to the publication of the NHS elective recovery plan.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. And I thank the Secretary of State for advanced sight of his statement. But it falls seriously short of the scale of the challenge facing the NHS and the misery that is affecting millions of people stuck on record high NHS waiting lists.

We’ve been waiting some time for his plan to tackle NHS waiting times. We were told it would arrive before Christmas. We were told it would arrive yesterday. And it’s not clear from his statement today that the delay was worth the wait.

There is no plan to tackle the workforce crisis. No plan to deal with delayed discharges and no hope of eliminating waits of more than a year before the general election in 2024. I wonder if they’ll be putting that on their election leaflets.

The only big new idea seems to be a website that tells people they’re waiting a long time, as if they didn’t already know.

I wonder if the Secretary of State can confirm whether the plan itself contains two other measures that have been floated in the press? One being the cancellation of patients’ follow-up appointments, whether they need them or not.

And the other being an offer that people can seize the opportunity to travel, hundreds of miles around the country if they can find a hospital in England that doesn’t already have a waiting list crisis of its own.

What we did hear was a series of re-announcements, including some perfectly sensible proposals for Community Diagnostic and Surgical Hubs. We welcome those, but the Secretary of State cannot pretend that they meet the scale of the challenge.

He did reaffirm the Prime Minister’s commitments on cancer announced only yesterday. He announced a new target that no one will wait more than two months for cancer diagnosis. But there is already a target for the vast majority of cancer patients to be treated within two months of referral.

So can the Health Secretary tell us which target he’s aiming to meet? The target that hasn’t been hit since 2015 or the target announced yesterday, which seems to lower standards for patients because they consistently failed to meet them.

The Prime Minister also announced that three out of four patients should receive a cancer diagnosis within 28 days. But this is an existing target that was introduced in April and has never been met.

With half a million patients with suspected cancer not being seen in time, it seems the Secretary of State declared a war on cancer after more than a decade of disarming the NHS and now he’s sending them into battle empty-handed.

It’s hard to believe that this is the announcement that the Secretary of State wanted to make. One government official briefed Robert Peston that the plan was being blocked by the Chancellor who is, and I quote, “reluctant to rescue The Prime Minister”.

Putting to one side the appalling spectacle of the Tory leadership crisis impacting on life and death decision making in government, it seems from the statement that the Chancellor has won the day.

What other explanation can there be for a plan to recover the NHS bring down waiting list that doesn’t contain a workforce plan?

The single biggest challenge facing the NHS is the workforce challenge. There are 93,000 staffing vacancies in the NHS today. It is understaffed, overworked and, if he’s not careful, he will lose more people than he is able to recruit.

This isn’t a new development and it shouldn’t be news to him. In April the NHS called for a national workforce plan. Polling from the Health Foundation found the public want more staff with fewer workload pressures. And the Secretary of State himself told the Health Select Committee in November that his plan would include a strategy for the workforce crisis.

We know the NHS want a workforce plan, the public want a workforce plan and he promised a workforce plan. So where is it? There isn’t even a budget for Health Education England, let alone a serious plan to recruit and retain the workforce we need.

Instead, he is proposing new NHS reservists. Who are they? Where are they coming from? How many does he imagine they will be? How does he imagine they’ll make a dent in the 93,000 vacancies. It seems more Dad’s Army than SAS.

Then there’s the issue of wider NHS and social care pressures, that impact directly on waiting lists and waiting times. The pressure on GP practices, that see people ringing the surgery at the crack of dawn in the hope of getting through before the appointments are gone.

The pressures on social care that lead to delayed discharges from hospital, as we saw in more than 400,000 cases in November alone. The missed opportunities and the wasted money that comes from a failure to invest in community services that leads to people turning up at A&E at greater cost of patient health, and greater cost to the taxpayer.

Mr. Speaker, this plan falls well short of the challenge facing our country. Six million people are waiting for care. Cancer care is in crisis with half a million patients, with suspected cancer not seen in time. Heart and stroke victims waiting over two hours for an ambulance when every minute matters.

And it’s clear from what the Secretary of State said today, what his colleague the Minister said yesterday, no doubt what will be heard repeated in the Tory scripts in the days and weeks to come, that the Conservatives are hoping to blame the state of NHS waiting list on the pandemic. The Covid waiting lists they called them. But this isn’t a covid backlog. It’s a Tory backlog.

After a decade of Tory mismanagement, the NHS had record waiting list of 4.5 million before the pandemic. Staff shortages of 100,000 before the pandemic. 17,000 fewer beds before the pandemic and 112,000 vacancies in social care before the pandemic. So in conclusion, Mr Speaker, it’s not just that they didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining, they dismantled the roof and remove the floorboards.

And with the ceiling of their ambition, that the Secretary of State outlined today, being to go back to where we were before the pandemic, it’s now clear that the longer we give the Conservatives in office, the longer patients will wait.