The NHS England waiting list stands at 7.2 million – and the shadow health secretary is one of them. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph today, and subsequently on the media round, Wes Streeting is speaking openly about being ‘mucked around’ by the NHS. He has been trying for months now to get a scan to confirm his kidney cancer is gone. But the appointment was pushed back, and then his time was wasted where he showed up for the results and discovered they had not been processed yet.
Streeting insists this is about ‘the system’, not the doctors and nurses who work inside of it. He says Labour is pledging more money and resources to the NHS, but only on the condition of better results for patients. His criticisms of the monopoly provider have painted him as ‘some sort of heretic’ in the British Medical Association’s eyes, he says, but that’s not going to stop him from speaking out. ‘I am just not going to allow vested interests and producer interests to stand in the way of the reforms that will deliver better outcomes for patients,’ he tells the newspaper.
In most other developed countries, comments like Streeting’s would not be particularly eye-catching. If the health system were failing patients anywhere near as badly as the NHS is, it would be expected that elected representatives come out and say so. But in the UK, his comments are explosive – revolutionary for a political class that, on the left and right, has avoided anything but high praise for a health service that was failing patients before Covid and is collapsing all around them now.
Streeting is weaving calls for more money into NHS reform, insisting the former cannot happen without the latter
Streeting has been building NHS criticisms into his stump speeches for a while now, willing to share his own experience with sickness to make the case that patients deserve better. He told The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman in September this year that he was going to become the ‘patient’s champion’ and would consider using the private sector as a ‘lever’ to help get people seen and treated.
That said, it’s not obvious yet that he has a firm plan for solutions: he repeatedly talks about revoking non-domiciled tax status to pay for the extra resources. Not only would this money look like pennies compared to the overall NHS budget, it also suggests the tried-and-failed experiment of funnelling more money into the system will be tried yet again if Labour enter No. 10.
But there is something notably different in the way Streeting is talking about NHS reform. He is weaving calls for more money into NHS reform, insisting the former cannot happen without the latter. No doubt there is growing frustration among some Tory MPs that the NHS is not working as it should, but it’s the Labour shadow health secretary that is coming out and saying so.
It was this time last year that The Spectator ran its cover ‘Our NHS’ – with the letters breaking, bandaged, and being propped up, just, by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson – detailing all the ways in which the NHS had let patients down during the pandemic and was failing to catch up. Healthcare spending was at record levels, and well above the OECD average now, and yet the system’s spiral was only speeding up.
At the time, the cabinet was talking behind closed doors about what a mess the NHS was, debating the need for serious reform. A year later, the NHS has been injected with £13 billion for Covid catch-up, £3 billion in the Autumn Statement. Yet still nothing serious has been said publicly about reform. Little has changed, apart from access to treatment and care diminishing even further for patients. But there is one other change: the rise of a Labour MP, willing to speak up, more and more, about the deep unfairness of the system for patients and workers. There are no signs he’s backing down anytime soon.
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