Wes Streeting MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 7 Jan 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Yes, I or the Minister of State for Health would be delighted to meet the hon. Member. She is right to describe the scale of challenge in urgent and emergency care. Of course, there are other challenges in east Kent, particularly in maternity services, which I am acutely aware of too, and I would be delighted to work with her to help solve some of those challenges in her community.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to have my hon. Friend and his experience in the House, standing up for his community and giving us his advice and wisdom as we develop our 10-year plan. We are already walking the talk on the shift to community, not least through the big uplift in funding for general practice announced before Christmas. Many people assume our elective reform plan is just about hospital waiting lists, but a big part of it is about delivering the left shift by asking and funding general practice to do more to manage patients in the community.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The shadow Secretary of State is right to say that we need staff in place to do the job. The additional funding announced by the Chancellor in the Budget is central to the delivery of this plan—I note that he opposes that funding, which is deeply regrettable—but we need to improve productivity as well. That is why the plan sets out steps to free up patient appointments that are unnecessary or of low clinical value, but, crucially, staff time in productivity gains is also important, so as well as making the most of the additional investment, we are making the most of delivering value for taxpayers’ money—

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I can definitely reassure the right hon. Gentleman that the Deputy Prime Minister and I are working very closely on this issue, which is close to her heart; she has a huge amount of experience in this area. We will follow her progress as she embarks on her local government reforms. Baroness Casey will take those reforms into account when she considers what the long-term future for social care will look like. Once again, I note the exhortation to go faster.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for that thoughtful question. Let me say two things to the right hon. Gentleman. The first relates to the wider fiscal pressures on the Chancellor. I find it difficult enough to manage the different choices and trade-offs to be made between different parts of health and social care and the competing challenges that I hear from Members in all parts of the House, so I am always thankful that I am not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has to balance demands from the NHS alongside the demands of education, a rising welfare bill, rising child poverty and the threats to our nation. These are enormous challenges, which is why I am determined to ensure that every penny that goes into the health service is well spent. My second responsibility, in addition to ensuring that patients are treated at the right time, in the right place and in the right way, is ensuring that we have a sustainable healthcare system in which there is reduced demand. That means doing more on the prevention side, so that we can keep people out of hospital and not needing to knock on the door of their GP surgery, so that they do not achieve the frequent flier status in the NHS that so many people do achieve—the one frequent flier status to which they do not aspire. We can deal with this only through both health service reform and public health reform, and I want very much to build cross-party consensus on the latter.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Persistence pays off: I would be happy to receive representations from the hon. Member about his local hospital and the potential to provide more community diagnostics. On the workforce, when we were consulting on this in opposition, we found a real willingness on the part of NHS staff to put in the extra hours, so long as they are fairly remunerated, which they will be. I am grateful for the investment that the Chancellor has provided to enable us to do that. NHS staff want to see progress to beat the backlog. They are as frustrated as anyone else—and demoralised, actually, at work—seeing people waiting for so long, so I have no doubt about their willingness to assist. I am looking forward to working with NHS staff across the country so that we can all feel that together we are delivering an improving NHS.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  The previous Labour Government delivered the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in history.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Before Christmas—I appreciate that it was just before, but I wanted to get out the certainty to general practitioners before we all went off for Christmas—we announced the biggest uplift in funding for general practice in a considerable number of years, and we will now negotiate the contract in the usual way. That should give general practitioners the stability and certainty to know that this Government are determined to fix the front door to the NHS. The other thing I would say to the Opposition is that they cannot continue to welcome the investment while opposing the means of raising it, unless they spell out which services they would cut or which other taxes they would increase. They do not have an answer; they do not have a leg to stand on.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for the work that she does on the NHS frontline, particularly when Parliament is in recess but often alongside her everyday work as a Member of this House. It is truly above and beyond the call of duty. She sees at first hand the pressures and failures that the NHS is experiencing. My hon. Friend is right about delayed discharge. In fact, when I was at Burnrigg Court, a residential care home in Carlisle, last week, I saw wonderful ensuite room facilities with people in intermediate NHS care—there are NHS-funded beds in those care homes—and those people were in better settings at half the costs of the hospital beds they left behind. Delivering better care in the right place at the right time is often not only great for patients but better value for taxpayers. That is why I will be reforming the better care fund to ensure that we make good use of NHS and social care budgets together to get people out of hospital as quickly as possible, freeing up vital bed capacity for others.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for that question. I am not sure that the level of exploitation in either independent healthcare or adult social care mirrors what we have seen, disgracefully, in children’s social care, but we keep a sharp eye on that. I remind my hon. Friend of the commitments we made in opposition around tackling the excesses and the worst kind of behaviour of some private equity-owned care homes that are leeching money out of the system. We will not tolerate that. We will act to regulate further. I hope that provides Members across the House with the assurance that we are taking both a principled and a pragmatic approach to the constructive and positive relationship we want to build with the independent sector, as we rebuild our national health service and build a national care service we can be proud of.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful for that question for two reasons. First, it gives me the chance once again to say that the first part of the Casey commission will be reporting next year, so we can set out a whole range of further actions that will be needed throughout this Parliament. We have taken a great number of actions already in the first six months and I dare say there will be more to follow in the next 12 months. I must say it is very encouraging that one thing we are hearing from across the House on the Casey commission overall is to go faster. I think that shows genuine cross-party appetite on this issue and that is a really good place to start.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for her question and for championing that issue since she arrived in the House six months ago. The disabled facilities grant is not just about new handrails, new ramps, new accessible kitchens and bathrooms and home adaptations; it is about freedom, independence, dignity and happiness. It is really good investment in preventing demand on other health and care services by giving people back their own independence and happiness.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  That is an excellent question. Having put in place funding to ensure that there are 1,000 more GPs on the frontline before April, and having announced just before Christmas a significant uplift for general practice, I hope that in the first six months of this Government, we have sent the strong message to people who aspire to long careers in medicine that general practice has a huge role to play in the NHS in the 21st century. It is an exciting place to be, but I recognise that we have to fix the front door to the NHS to make it more attractive. The situation is even worse than my hon. Friend has described, because when the Conservatives left government, there were qualified GPs unable to find jobs, at a time when patients were unable to find GPs. We got to work on that issue within weeks of taking office, and we will do more over the next 12 months.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Of the many great possibilities and opportunities facing this country are our strengths in life sciences and medical technology. If we can combine the strength of our scientific and technological base with the ingenuity and care of our NHS staff and our ability to deliver at scale with the model that was designed in 1948, which is well served to take us well into the 21st century, the sky is the limit for what we can achieve. We will have to support staff through that revolution. I appreciate that for many staff working in the NHS today they would be grateful if the machine simply turned on when they turned up for work.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend, who has done much to bang the drum on this issue during the six months in which she has been a Member of this House. That is why we are taking a systematic approach to health and social care reform.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  We will certainly write to the hon. Member with further information about Hereford CDC. On capital investment, I say to her and to other right hon. and hon. Members that we were very pleased with what the Chancellor was able to deliver in the Budget. We recognise that the stop-start we saw on a number of capital programmes under our predecessors was frustrating and we are determined not to repeat that. That is why we are setting out clear and consistent proposals for capital investment in the NHS.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  A happy new year to you, Mr Speaker, and to everyone across the House. With your permission, I will give an update on health and adult social care reform. I start by paying tribute to the NHS and social care staff who worked throughout the Christmas break, including by staffing our hospitals, ambulance services, care homes and call centres on Christmas day and throughout the new year. From visiting hospitals and residential care homes in the south-west of England, Essex, London, South Yorkshire and the north-west over the past two weeks, I know the extent of the pressures they are dealing with. They are going above and beyond to keep the NHS standing, to provide people with the social care they need and to give patients and care users the best care they possibly can against the most challenging backdrop. We have seen more than three times as many patients hospitalised with flu this winter compared with last year, in a service with no slack left to give. Since coming into office, the Government have been doing everything we can to prepare the NHS for winter, including by ending the resident doctors’ strikes. This is the first winter in three years when staff are on the frontline, not the picket line. The Chancellor made an additional £1.8 billion available in-year to fill the black hole left by the previous Government, and we introduced the new respiratory syncytial virus vaccine to protect more than 1.2 million people against the virus. But I am not going to pretend for a second that the experience of patients this winter is acceptable. The Government have been honest about the state of the NHS since the election, and we will continue to be. The NHS is broken but not beaten. It will take time to fix, but it can be done. That is why the Chancellor made an additional £1.8 billion available in-year to fill the black hole left by the previous Government and to enable us to deliver on our first steps to cut NHS waiting times. That is why we are undertaking fundamental reform, and it is why we are acting on social care. These are the honest facts. The social care system in this country is failing, leaving hundreds of thousands of disabled and elderly people without the care they need. The failure of social care is piling enormous pressures on the NHS. In November, more than 12,400 hospital patients a day were well enough to leave but had to stay overnight because they were not able to be discharged. We have an ageing society: by 2050, there will be 4 million more people aged 65 and over in England. If we do nothing, social care costs are expected to double over two decades. Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around. In 2009, when Andy Burnham established cross-party talks on social care, the Conservatives pulled out and leaked details of the talks to attack Labour. In 2017, it was Labour who torpedoed Theresa May’s proposals. And in 2022, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) as Chancellor delayed Boris Johnson’s cap on care costs, and then defunded them as Prime Minister. There has not been a shortage of good ideas in the past 15 years, but a lack of good politics. It is time all of us across the House do things differently. I have written to my opposite numbers and the leaders of all UK-wide parties represented in the House to invite them to help break out of the cycle of political failure. I hope all of us across the House will put aside our ideological and partisan differences, and work together on this, to finally find a way through to a long-term plan that can build the broad consensus we need. We do not need to agree on everything, but in April we will launch an independent commission on building a national care service. I am delighted that it will be headed by one of our country’s leading social reformers, and Whitehall’s greatest doer, Baroness Louise Casey. Baroness Casey has served Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Governments. She is a trusted, independent figure, who will take views from all parties and, crucially, the public as she seeks to build a cross-party and national consensus on the future of social care. She will get things done. Her first report will be published next year, making a series of recommendations that can be implemented straight away throughout this Parliament, and her final report will come later in this Parliament. In the meantime, we are stabilising the social care system today. We have legislated for the first ever fair pay agreement for social care, to tackle the workforce crisis—the 131,000 vacancies we see today. In the Budget, the Chancellor provided the biggest increase in carer’s allowance since the 1970s, worth £2,300 a year to family carers, and an extra £3.7 billion for local authorities. On Friday, I visited the home of Keith and Elaine in Carlisle. I saw at first hand how extended doorways and the installation of accessible kitchen and bathroom facilities have changed their lives, thanks to the disabled facilities grant, allowing them to live with renewed dignity, independence and happiness. That is why I announced last week the immediate release of £86 million through the disabled facilities grant, to provide an extra 7,800 home adaptations before April, changing the lives of thousands more disabled people for the better, just as Keith and Elaine have experienced. We are not hanging around on reform either. We are introducing new standards to help people who use care, their families and providers to choose the most effective new technology as it comes on the market. We are joining up care and medical records, so NHS and care staff have the full picture they need to provide the best possible care. And we are training care workers to perform more health interventions to help people stay well and at home. A lot done, a huge amount more to do and, if this House gets this right, the best is yet to come. Turning to the elective reform plan the Prime Minister has launched today, the Government inherited NHS waiting lists at 7.6 million. The NHS standard, that patients should wait no longer than 18 weeks for treatment, has not been met for a decade. Millions of patients are forced to put their lives on hold while they wait. In his investigation, Lord Darzi listed the causes of this crisis: the undoing of new Labour’s reforms, the disastrous top-down reorganisation, and slashing GPs and community health services, all of which have led to a dramatic drop in hospital productivity. Lord Darzi has diagnosed the condition; now this Labour Government are prescribing the cure. In November, the Prime Minister set out the Government’s plan for change—a plan to dig this country out of the hole it was left in and an act of resistance against the status quo of managed decline. It committed to cutting maximum waiting times from 18 months today to 18 weeks by the end of this Parliament. Today, we are setting out how we will hit that ambitious target, so that once again the NHS is there for us when we need it. This will demand faster improvement than even the last Labour Government achieved. That means doing things differently. It had to be a plan for investment and reform. Investment and reform is what Labour promised before the election. Investment and reform is what we are delivering. Our elective reform plan will cut waste and inefficiency, ramp up the number of appointments, scans and operations that the NHS performs, and give NHS patients greater choice, control and convenience. Any patient using the NHS can see the waste and inefficiency in the service when they use it. Staff feel it holding them back every day. When the Government announced significant investment in the Budget, I said that it would come with reform, so that every pound was well spent, and here it is. Resources will be diverted from hospitals to GPs, to get hundreds of thousands more patients cared for faster in the community. Patients will have the choice of whether they want or need follow-up appointments, saving a million pointless appointments a year. GPs will be able to directly refer patients for tests and scans, cutting out the middle man and speeding up diagnoses for patients across a wide range of conditions. For years, restaurants have been texting customers reminders of their bookings, giving them the chance to cancel or rearrange, to cut down on no-shows. The NHS will learn from the hospitality sector, do the same for patients, and cut around a million missed appointments every year as a result. In opposition, we said that investment in new and more productive ways of working would make a significant dent in waiting times. Today, we are announcing 17 new and expanded surgical hubs to run like Formula 1 pitstops and bust through the backlog. Community diagnostic centres will open at evenings and weekends so that patients do not have to take a time off work for their appointment, and can get diagnosed faster. We are rewarding trusts that cut waiting times fastest with extra capital investment as an incentive, and we are publishing a new agreement with the independent sector—the first of its kind for 25 years—to cut waiting times. Over the past 14 years, a two-tier healthcare system emerged in this country. People who can afford it are increasingly going private to skip the queue, while those who cannot are left behind. Working people are going into debt, and others are running fundraisers to pay to get an operation. Those stories belong in pre-war Britain. They should shame the Conservative party. I am determined to end two-tier healthcare in this country, so that whether you are the richest or poorest person in Britain, you get timely, quality treatment, free at the point of use. This new agreement will see more NHS patients able to choose to be treated in a private hospital where there is capacity, paid for by the state. More capacity will be available for people in working-class areas of the country, and for women stuck on gynaecology waiting lists. Where we can treat working people faster, we will, and we make no apology for doing so. Working-class patients in this country deserve the same choice, control and convenience as the wealthy expect—indeed, as we all expect from other apps and services that we use every day, but not the NHS. That is why we are also modernising the NHS app to put patients in the driving seat for their own care. If customers can choose when their Deliveroo meal will arrive, and be kept informed until it is dropped off, why should patients not be afforded the same service by the NHS? With this plan, they will be. Patients will be able to manage their appointments, book tests and scans, view results as soon as they are ready, and choose where they will be treated. We will cut down on letters that arrive in the post after an appointment, and give power back to the patient. In the past six months, we have ended the resident doctors’ strike and invested billions more in our health service, with the biggest investment in hospices and end of life care for a generation. We are delivering investment and reform in general practice to fix the front door to the NHS and bring back the family doctor, and we have started to get NHS waiting lists falling. This plan for investment and reform will press down harder on the accelerator and will change our NHS and the experience of millions of patients. It will put the NHS on the road to recovery, and I commend this statement to the House.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  By definition, an elective recovery plan for England does not include Wales. However, I can assure the hon. Lady that we have a great working relationship with Jeremy Miles, the Health Minister in the Welsh Government, and with the First Minister herself. Not only are we providing support to the Welsh Government on elective reform to help them to cut waiting lists and waiting times, but we are receiving advice from the Welsh Government on areas where health and social care services are doing better than in England. Together, we will create a rising tide that lifts all ships across the UK.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I was grateful to staff at Derriford hospital for showing me at first hand the emergency department pressures when I visited just before Christmas. I have also visited Derriford at the height of summer, when it experiences high pressures. There are year-round difficulties at Derriford, and I thank the staff and leadership of the hospital for what they are doing in difficult circumstances. We will come forward shortly with the timetable for the new hospitals programme. I expect that it will be published sooner than the Conservatives apologise for their appalling record.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely rightly. The Employment Rights Bill, introduced in our first 100 days, contains provisions for a new fair pay agreement for care workers, and who better to be leading the charge on that than the care worker turned Deputy Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner).

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  The ministerial team and I have enjoyed working with counterparts in the devolved Governments over the last six months, and we will continue to do that. Thanks to the decisions that the Chancellor took in the Budget, we see significant investment in health and care services here in England, and the Barnett consequentials will create a rising tide that will lift all ships across England, Wales and Scotland. I might even say that all roads lead to Westminster. I say this to Scottish National party colleagues: down the road to Westminster lie the resources for the SNP Government, so they do not have an excuse not to act.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for that question. I am a proud member of Unison, and I am proud of its work to stand up for its workforce in the social care sector. She and Unison are absolutely right to argue that fair pay is essential to recruitment and retention. That is why I am delighted that the Deputy Prime Minister included fair pay agreements in the Employment Rights Bill in the first 100 days. I am looking forward to working with Unison, GMB and others to negotiate the first ever fair pay agreements for care professionals in this country.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Clinical academics have an important role to play in the national health service and in innovation in medicine. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education is focused on university finances, and I think universities should ensure that they prioritise efficiently and effectively, making best use of the resources available to them. I would gently say that universities have not struggled as much as other parts of the public sector over the past 14 years.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Further to the previous question, we will be refreshing and updating the NHS workforce plan alongside the long-term plan that we will publish in May, and my hon. Friend is right that rehab is key not just to good recovery but to prevention of future demand on the NHS. I saw a great example of that rehabilitation delivered in social care settings only last week. Whether in the NHS or in social care, we definitely need to do more on rehabilitation, because rehabilitation is often secondary prevention.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Health and Adult Social Care Reform · Hansard source

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  Thanks to the decisions taken by the Chancellor in the Budget, we are boosting the spending power of local authorities significantly, and £880 million has been ringfenced specifically for social care. I appreciate that a single Budget cannot undo 14 years of Conservative failure, but this is an important start, and of course we want year-on-year improvement in the delivery of social care. Baroness Casey will consider all these issues, and also how we can improve ease of access and care quality across the public and private sectors.