Read Health Secretary Yvette Cooper’s conference speech in full

Conference, we are here in what was once the Liverpool Exchange constituency, represented by the great Labour health pioneer Bessie Braddock.

Bessie was a passionate campaigner on poverty and unemployment, a trailblazer for women’s health. And she drove ambulances across Liverpool during the war.

80 years ago this Autumn, Bessie was one of the Labour MPs who campaigned for and voted for the 1946 National Health Service Act- the law that created our NHS.

Bessie said on the day that the NHS legislation was passed: “This Bill is the biggest step forward ever proposed to keep the people of this country healthy when they are well, and deal with them kindly when they are ill.”

Bessie was right. Our NHS was the biggest step forward our country ever took towards equality and social justice. Based on the care you need not what you pay.

After our nation’s finest hour, our party’s greatest achievement, our NHS.

Conference we saw yesterday Andy Burnham’s passion, determination and conviction: real leadership taking on the biggest challenges facing our country; putting hope back in people’s hearts. Conference, didn’t he do his father proud?

At the heart of that powerful and personal speech yesterday was our new task. To finish the work that Barbara Castle started fifty years ago. To bring together health and social care. There for everyone who needs it, when they need it.

A National Care Service alongside our National Health Service, with dignity and decency for all.
Baroness Casey’s commission on social care will report with more details next year.

And we will build a new National Care Service over time. But there are foundations we can start to build now.

Because there’s one thing we already know. Care starts with people. With unpaid carers and overstretched careworkers, who care for us when we can no longer care for ourselves.

So we will appoint a new champion for Unpaid Carers and make sure the voice of that hidden army is always heard in Government.

And we will deliver the first ever legally binding Fair Pay Agreement for care workers, with minimum standards of pay and conditions across every employer. Because care workers have been undervalued and underpaid for far too long.

But there is more I can announce today.

We will publish a proper workforce plan for social care, with proper career pathways, training and development of specialist skills, and we will offer thousands more academy places to help young jobseekers into good jobs in care.

And, thanks to the campaigning of all the Unison members in this hall, we will go further. Because it is just wrong that the people who work hardest to help others maintain dignity and respect in old age too often get nothing back for retirement themselves.

So I can announce today that we will introduce the first ever national collective pension scheme for workers in the care sector. Fair pay, fair terms and conditions, a workforce plan, and now a proper pension scheme. Giving our care workers the respect they deserve.

Conference, I’m very proud to be Labour’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
I admit I have spoken from this stage in a few different roles over the years – including as a minister in seven different government departments. Each one has its own culture and quirks.
In the Treasury and in Housing back in the day, they just called me Yvette.

In the Health Department they call you “Secretary of State”, which is fine until they shorten it to SoS, and every email sounds like a cry for help.

As Foreign Secretary, they call you FS: ‘FS here’s your papers’, ‘FS you’re late for your plane’. Which is fine until your last day in the job, when they tell you your new acronym spells Former Foreign Secretary. FFS. Oh for goodness’ sake.

Even worse was the Home Office where they call you “Home Sec”. which was fine until a new press officer decided to use Siri to show me on his phone the interview he’d recorded earlier and said “Siri, Play the Home Sec’s tape.”

The last time I was a Minister in the Health and Social Care Department was a quarter of a century ago. I’m proud to have been part of the last Labour Government that rebuilt our NHS after 18 years of the Tories, and in the face of right wing politicians who said the NHS could not and should not be saved.

Yet that’s what we did. More doctors, nurses, midwives. Bringing down waiting lists. Speeding up cancer treatment. And yes the thing that made me proudest of all, bringing in Sure Start.

The last Labour Government saved lives and saved our NHS too. That’s why I know it can be done again. But let no-one play down the latest damage the Tories have done since then.

After 2010, they took us from the shortest waiting lists in generations to the longest. From the highest public satisfaction in our NHS to the lowest.

Fourteen years of disastrous decisions, neglect and waste. Not just the battering by austerity, but the vandalism of the Lansley reforms. Billions of pounds spent fracturing our NHS. Treating healthcare as a market chasing profit not a service saving lives.

Ballooning bureaucracy, crumbling hospitals, outdated technology, so by the time Covid struck, our NHS was already running on empty.

Two years into a Labour Government, we are rebuilding our NHS again, with the vital work Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and James Murray began.

12,000 more doctors, 14,000 more nurses and health visitors, 1,900 more midwives, over 8,000 more mental health workers, 5 million more hospital appointments a year, 3.5 million more NHS dental treatments a year, 20 million more GP appointments a year, all bringing waiting times down. That’s the difference a Labour Government can make.

Conference, all this has only happened because of the hard work and dedication of our NHS staff. One Chief Nurse I met recently at the beginning of her night shift told me the essential message that she gave to all the staff: treat every person here as if they were your own parent, partner or child.

That is the kind of approach our NHS ultimately depends on. And it is what so many NHS and care workers did for all of us on the frontline of the pandemic. We clapped them then from our doorsteps when we needed them in Covid, we must not forget that now as we applaud and thank them again.

The challenges facing our NHS now are greater than ever. Thanks to climate change, we have to plan now for extreme heat, not just winter cold and flu. This July we had the highest number of attendances in our A&E in any month ever, at any time of the year.

But there are greater pressures all year now. More frail elderly in hospital than ever. More children struggling with obesity than ever. More teenagers in mental health crisis than ever.

And when we look at how these pressures have grown since 2010, there is something fundamental – something that the parties of the right never recognise.

Every time they tore a chunk out of the fabric of our society, it was our NHS which had to pick up the pieces. When they cut social care, when they ripped up local partnerships, more elderly people ended up in hospital instead. When they pushed up child poverty, reduced free school meals, closed sports centres, and destroyed Sure Start, more children suffered worse health.

And that is why, for me, the path to recovery of our NHS is not just within the walls of our hospitals. It is about what we need to do together, in every community, to support people before they need medical care.

So that means we have to do health differently too, as our 10-year health plan set out: working in communities; scans and tests carried out in shopping centres; mental health support workers in our schools.

Here in Liverpool, one of our new Neighbourhood Health teams brought together different services to identify who was most at risk of ending up in hospital then worked to keep them well instead – through things like home monitoring of conditions – and reduced their A&E attendances by a third.

And conference, we have an incredible combination and an incredible opportunity in this country – some of the best science, research and technology in the world alongside our universal health service – giving us the chance in the UK if we take it to eradicate Cervical Cancer and Hepatitis C and to end new transmissions of HIV.

And making us uniquely placed to lead the world in discovering the new tests, the new vaccines, the new cures for the diseases that have robbed families of loved ones for too long; from brain tumours to dementia, from prostate cancer to MND, just think what we could achieve.

But Conference, any ambition to transform our NHS has to start at the very beginning of life.
When Nye Bevan explained the National Health Service eighty years ago – he said it would support families “from the cradle to the grave.” Yet I believe in recent years, too often the cradle has been forgotten.

There is some amazing care in maternity services across the country from dedicated midwives, consultants and staff. But there have been too many heart-breaking stories where things have gone wrong but the rest of the NHS didn’t take it seriously or didn’t notice.

The Ockenden reviews, the Amos report, the Thirlwell Inquiry.

Parents not being listened to. Maternity services treated as a side car for the main hospital not a priority for the whole NHS. And the shocking truth that maternal mortality is three times worse for black mothers.

You know when I started this job, I said in my first interview that improving maternity care for all would be one of my top priorities.

I saw the reaction the next day on social media in a conversation between a senior doctor, a senior health journalist, and a former special adviser to Matt Hancock.

Here’s what they said: “Underwhelming first intervention”, “Very narrow in focus”, “On the strength of that interview…. Andy Burnham’s first mistake.”

Three men telling a woman Health Secretary she was wrong to focus on maternity care. Three men telling the nine out of ten young women who say they want to be mums one day that concentrating on their needs is “very narrow”. That’s what we are up against. That’s what we’ve been up against for decades.

So let me spell it out for them. Nothing about childbirth is “underwhelming”. It is never too “narrow” to focus on the very start of a new family life.

When more women give birth in our NHS each year than all the hip and knee operations for men and women put together, it is never a “mistake” to focus on women, families, and babies, because every child deserves the very best start in life.

As a minister twenty-five years ago I set out a plan for national maternity standards to improve care, but under the Conservative Government they were just dropped.

So later this year, with our Maternity Taskforce, we will bring back new national maternity standards, including baby loss and post pregnancy care, and we will appoint an independent Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner.

Because I am sick and tired of women and babies being treated as second class patients, and I will not stop until every mother is given the care she deserves.

But you know, the precious start of a child’s life goes far beyond the maternity unit.

I am still angry about the Conservatives abolishing Sure Start – as I told George Osborne to his face this summer.

A shocking decision, especially as the evidence shows that Sure Start improved mental health, reduced absence from schools, improved education achievement, prevented hospital admissions for years to come, and that some of the biggest positive impacts were on working class boys.

Since the election, Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell have been working to rebuild family hubs across the country, bringing back support for parents and for young children. But something is missing. Compared to last time round, in half of our councils, hubs are missing important Sure Start health services.

They don’t have the Healthy Babies support, the mental health care for mums and dads, the feeding and bonding support for babies.

That changes now.

I can announce we will bring back those Sure Start health services into every family centre. Reaching up to 1,000 family hubs over the next two years. Sure Start – one of the Labour Party’s greatest achievements restored to families throughout the land.

And Conference, we have to face up to something else.

One of the biggest causes of ill health and harm for women, including in pregnancy, isn’t really treated on the NHS. That is domestic abuse. It affected 2.2m women last year.

Yet we don’t treat violence against women and girls as the epidemic it really is. So here’s what we will change. For the first time, we will take a public health approach to violence against women and girls. We will work with survivors, charities, local government, and the NHS to set out how to treat this like the disease it is.

And today I am announcing the rollout of almost £50m support for new specialist referral services from GPs for women and men who are victims of domestic abuse.

Because conference when I stood here as Home Secretary two years ago and said our mission to halve violence against women and girls covered the whole of government, I meant it.

All of us have a responsibility to ensure that everyone can live in freedom from fear.

But Conference, all the damage we are repairing, all the progress we are making, all the hope we are building, depends on Labour being in power.

We know, because we have seen it before, the threats to our NHS if the Tories get back in.

But there is also a serious threat from a party which has more policies on cryptocurrency than it does on health, whose only health policy at the last election was a £1.7 billion tax break for private health care companies, and whose leader has never believed in the NHS and would sell it for parts if he was ever given the chance.

Those are the stakes. And we must be ready fight for the future of the NHS just as hard as Nye Bevan and Bessie Braddock fought for its creation.

When Nye Bevan led that fight eighty years ago, he said the task of the NHS was to lift the shadow from millions of homes.

The shadow of sickness, the shadow of pain, the shadow of being unable to pay the doctors’ bills. For eighty years, that is what our NHS has been for us.

The three white letters on the blue lozenge which show where we can turn when shadows fall.
And now it is the task of our generation: to lift the shadows again. From women living in fear, from families living with cancer, from older people worried about their care bills. And to give children the chance to come out of the shadows and to get the best and surest start in life.

We did it eighty years ago, and we will do it again today. We fought for it eighty years ago, and we must fight for it again today. For the NHS that we have always believed in.

That is the way we will lift the shadows.

And that is the way we will bring back hope.

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