Wes Streeting: “Only Labour can be trusted to reform the NHS”

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting on Monday morning at a LabourList fringe event said that “just as only Nixon could go to China, only Labour can be trusted to reform the NHS”.

Streeting promised that reforming the NHS would be the centrepiece of his conference speech on Wednesday, saying “if we make the big calls right, the sky is the limit about what the NHS – what our country – can achieve. But that requires reform”. Streeting concluded that only Labour could be trusted by the public to do this, adding: “a party literally dancing to the tune of Nigel Farage cannot be trusted with the NHS.” 

Streeting spoken on a panel with Council Chair of the British medical association Professor Phil Banfield, Royal college of nursing vice chair Paul Vaughn, and board member for LabourList Karin Christiansen board for Labourlist.

The Shadow Health Secretary said that the biggest challenge facing the NHS was the “moral injury” facing workers. “People go to work, do their best, slog their guts out, and go home feeling that their best isn’t good enough”, he said, continuing: “They see patients not receiving the quality and timely access to care that they deserve.”

Streeting also focused on waiting lists as a critical issue, arguing that the reason people are waiting so long to access essential services is that the NHS does not have the staff it needs. 

NHS waiting lists hit a record high this summer, with 7.47mn people are waiting to start routine hospital treatment, figures for the end of May revealed. This was a rise from 7.42mn the previous month.

Vice chair of the Royal college of nursing Paul Vaughn agreed, saying that vacancies in the NHS are “really important”, noting that in a recent survey 83% of NHS workers said this was the biggest issue. He argued that vacancies were causing nurses to be stressed, overworked, and burnt out. 

Council Chair of the British medical association Professor Phil Banfield said that “[NHS workers] went into pandemic feeling undervalued, went through – feeling marginally at the start feeling valued – now rhetoric has changed to demonise work force. There is an attempt to assassinate the character of the GP.”

Streeting said the solution to this was reforming the NHS, arguing that it was not about applying another model of funding but about “where the money goes and how care is organised. We get to people too late, and that makes conditions harder to treat.”

The Shadow Health Secretary said  Labour would not make any funding commitments to the NHS that it could not be sure it could keep. He discussed Labour’s approach to funding the health service in the run-up to 1997,  telling the audience: “We said, we will do our best as quickly as we can to improve things for staff in the NHS … We could do that because we had a growing economy, we didn’t have to clobber people with higher taxes.”

We have people sitting in the aisles for @LabourList‘s How does Labour build an NHS workforce fit for the future? With @wesstreeting, @patcullen9, @DrPhilBanfield in partnership with @TheBMA and @theRCN #Lab23 #Labconf23 #Liverpool pic.twitter.com/UOB7GlmHzF

— LabourList (@LabourList) October 9, 2023

Streeting criticised the Conservative government for pulling the “immigration lever” to tackle NHS shortages during its thirteen years in government: “Don’t be any doubt about my pride in the NHS international recruitment, but what I do think is shameful is the reliance of workers drawn from overseas.” He said Conservative policy to recruit doctors from red list countries which lacked doctors was “immoral”.

The fringe meeting held by LabourList had a long queue outside. Streeting joked as the event started that it was “better to crush their hopes than keep people queuing… that’s not Labour policy by the way!” 

Watch part one of our event video coverage here, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you don’t miss out on live recordings from all our events at conference.

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