Wes Streeting MP: speeches

Speeches

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the importance of screening, and it is brilliant to see him fighting fit. That is exactly the sort of outcome that we want from effective diagnosis and treatment. He is also right to highlight the racial inequalities in this area. It cannot be right in this decade of the 21st century that black men are twice as likely as white men to die of prostate cancer. The national cancer plan will come out later this year, and the screening committee is looking at the case he makes. He will find at the centre of the 10-year plan a commitment not just to diagnose earlier and treat faster, but to tackle the gross health inequalities that blight our society in a way that is simply not tolerable in the 21st century.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, as it gives me the chance to say an enormous thank you to everyone involved. I hope that people are beginning to feel the benefits and will see the change that comes from having a great Labour MP and a Labour Government who deliver the change that our country desperately needs.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  Given my hon. Friend’s expertise, I am delighted that he has welcomed the plan so enthusiastically. I wholeheartedly agree with what he said. I give him 10 out of 10 for his product placement of the 10-year plan and, in particular, his remarks on the design of the front cover, which I will pass on to the team.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  First, I thank the hon. Member for the Green party’s support for so much of the 10-year plan. She is right to highlight the importance of social care to resolving the NHS crisis. Let me reassure her that we are acting urgently as we await the first report of the Casey commission. The Chancellor did that with the Budget and the spending review, providing £4 billion more of investment. We have done that with the biggest increase in carer’s allowance since the 1970s, and with the disabled facilities grant, which does not just mean more ramps and home adaptations but more freedom, more dignity and more independence for disabled people. The Deputy Prime Minister and I will shortly set out how we will deliver fair pay agreements, and social care will absolutely be part of the neighbourhood health team. I hope that that reassures the hon. Member. Let me also reassure parties across the House that we will wait for the Casey commission to launch. I would like to be able to proceed with the actions we will be taking in this Parliament and, crucially, with the long-term plan for social care in a cross-party way, to build that genuine national consensus—I would be delighted to achieve that.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her question and for the leadership she is showing to the Select Committee while the substantive Chair, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), is off on mat leave. What a delight it was to see the Committee Chair on the Terrace this week with her new baby. That was really delightful and we wish her well. One of the exciting things for me about today’s launch is just how widespread the support has been from across a range of different organisations that we will need to work with to deliver the plan. Whether it is the royal colleges and the trade unions, the organisations that represent patients, the wide range of healthcare charities or, crucially, frontline staff, everyone is up for this change and everyone is desperate for it to succeed. We will not get everything right and we will make mistakes along the way. We will listen and always learn and reflect. We know in the Government that we cannot do this without effective leadership from Ministers, but nor can Government do this alone. It is now our responsibility to mobilise the more than 1.5 million people who work in the NHS, the more than 1.5 million people who work in social care and our whole country behind a national mission to get our NHS back on its feet, to make sure it is fit for the future and to make sure, fundamentally, that we attack the injustices that lead to ill health, so that we have a fairer Britain where everyone lives well for longer.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I am delighted with the work that my hon. Friend is doing to assist us with the development of a new men’s health strategy, including a focus on men’s mental health, which he has raised so powerfully on more than one occasion in this House. I hope he will be pleased with the results. By working closely with him, voluntary sector organisations and the NHS, we will make sure we get it right.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for the plan. Success has many masters, and I thank him for putting the Carr-Hill formula on the parliamentary agenda through his debate. I can reassure him about a few things. First, what the Chancellor has done in the spending review gives us the advantage of medium-term certainty, so the NHS will now be in the business of medium-term planning with the system, which enables it to make better use of the money that is allocated. Secondly, we are ending Healthwatch—I express my thanks to the people who have worked in Healthwatch for many years—but we are giving power directly to the patients. Alongside that, we are looking at what we can do to strengthen democratic accountability from elected representatives, to ensure that the patient voice and interests are protected.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that question— [ Laughter. ] Given that the Bill is still passing through Parliament, assisted dying is not referred to in this 10-year-plan, but I assure both this House and the other place that regardless of different views among Ministers and across the House, we will abide by the law of the land. We will abide by the will of this House and the other place. If the Bill times out in the other place, I have no doubt that someone else will bring it back. I suspect it will not be a Government Bill. It is important that we have the debate and that we scrutinise the legislation well. I am proud of the way the House has conducted the debate. My hon. Friend the Minister for Care, who is not in his place now, along with the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Sarah Sackman), have done an exemplary job in supporting people on both sides of the debate to give the Bill the detailed scrutiny that it had here and that it will no doubt have in the other place. That is a credit to this House.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right and it is brilliant to have her expertise represented on the Government Benches. She is right about the importance of physiotherapy, not just for improved and better-quality recovery, but for admission avoidance. I want physios and other allied health professionals to be at the heart of the neighbourhood health service, and I know that she will hold us to account to ensure we deliver.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I knew exactly where that question was going, because my hon. Friend has been such a strong champion of his constituency since he arrived in this place. I am committed to rolling out neighbourhood health across the country, and to making sure that we particularly benefit the communities with the greatest need that are the most poorly served. This is in no small part possible thanks to the leadership of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the wise decisions that she has taken. Not only have we delivered investment in the NHS, but interest rates have fallen four times, wages are finally rising at a higher rate than the cost of living, and we have the fastest-growing economy in the G7. That is the leadership that we need from the Chancellor, and it is here to stay.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall make a statement to the House on “Fit for the Future”, the Government’s 10-year health plan for England. There are moments in our national story when our choices define who we are. In 1948, the Attlee Government made a choice founded on fairness: that everyone in our country deserves to receive the care they need, not just the care they can afford. It enshrined in law, and in the service itself, our collective conviction that healthcare is not a privilege to be bought and sold, but a right to be cherished and protected. Now it falls to our generation to make the same choice: to rebuild our national health service, and to protect in this century what Attlee’s Government built for the last. That is the driving mission of our 10-year plan. In September, Lord Darzi provided the diagnosis: the NHS was broken by 14 years of Conservative under-investment, and by their catastrophic top-down reorganisation. In the past year, Labour has put the NHS on the road to recovery. We promised 2 million extra appointments; we have delivered more than 4 million. We promised 1,000 new GPs on the frontline; we have recruited 1,900. We have taken almost a quarter of a million people off waiting lists, cutting them to their lowest level in two years. And we have launched an independent commission, chaired by Baroness Casey, to build a national consensus around a new national care service to meet the needs of older and disabled people into the 21st century. Today, the Prime Minister has set out our prescription to get the NHS back on its feet and make it fit for the future. Our plan will deliver three big shifts. The first is from hospital to community. We will turn our national health service into a neighbourhood health service. The principle is simple: care should happen as locally as it can—digitally by default, in a patient’s home if possible, in a neighbourhood health centre when needed, and in a hospital where necessary. We will put neighbourhood health centres in every community, so people can see a GP, nurse, physio, care worker, and therapist, and they can get a test, scan or treatment for minor injuries, all under one roof. The NHS will be organised around patients, rather than patients having to organise their lives around the NHS. It will be easier and faster to see a GP. We will train thousands more, end the 8 am scramble, provide same-day consultations, and bring back the family doctor. If you are someone with multiple conditions and complex needs, the NHS will co-create a personal care plan, so your care is done with you, not to you. Pharmacies will play an expanded role in the neighbourhood health service. They will manage long-term conditions, treat conditions such as obesity and high blood pressure, screen for disease and vaccinate against it. We will also reform the dental contract, to get more dentists doing NHS work, rebuilding NHS dentistry. Over the course of this plan, the majority of the 135 million out-patient appointments done each year will be moved out of hospitals. The funding will follow, so a greater share of NHS investment is spent in primary and community care. The second shift is from analogue to digital. No longer will NHS staff have to enter seven passwords to login to their computers, or spend hours writing notes and entering data. Our plan will liberate frontline staff from the parts of the job that they hate, so they can focus on the job that they love—caring for patients. For the first time ever, patients will be given real control over a single, secure and authoritative account of their data. The single patient record will mean that NHS staff can see medical records and know a patient’s medical history, so they can provide them with the best possible care. Wearable technology will feed in real-time health data, so patients’ health can be monitored while they stay in the comfort of their own home, with clinicians reaching out at the first signs of deterioration. The NHS app will become the front door to the health service, delivering power to the patient. You will be able to: book and rearrange appointments for you, your children or a loved one you care for; get instant advice from an AI doctor in your pocket; leave feedback on your care and see what feedback other patients have left; choose where you are treated; book appointments in urgent care so you do not wait for hours; and refer yourself to a specialist where clinically appropriate. Of course, patients can already do all that, but only if they can afford private healthcare. With Labour’s plan, every patient will receive a first-class service—whatever their background and whatever they earn. The third shift is from sickness to prevention. Working with the food industry, we will make the healthy choice the easy choice to cut calories. We will roll out obesity jabs on the NHS. We will get Britain moving with our new NHS points scheme, and we will update school foods standards so that kids are fed healthy, nutritious meals. We will tackle the mental health crisis with support in every school to catch problems early, 24/7 support with virtual therapists for those with moderate need, and dedicated emergency departments for patients for when they reach crisis point. The science is on our side. The revolution in artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data offers a golden opportunity to deliver better care at better value. New innovator passports and reform of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency will see medicines and technology rapidly adopted. Robotic surgery will become the norm in certain procedures, so patients recover from surgery at home rather than in hospital beds. The NHS will usher in a new age of medicine, leapfrogging disease so that we are predicting and preventing, rather than just diagnosing and treating. It is therefore the ambition of the plan to provide a genomic test for every newborn baby by 2035. Thanks to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, this plan is backed by an extra £29 billion a year by the end of the spending review period, as well as the biggest capital investment in the history of the NHS. Alongside investment comes reform. This plan slashes unnecessary bureaucracy and devolves power and resource to the frontline. It abolishes more than 200 bodies, because listening to patients, guaranteeing safety and protecting whistleblowers is core business for the NHS and should never have been outsourced. The plan commits to publishing league tables to rank providers. We will intervene to turn around failing providers, and we will reinvent the foundation trust model in a new system of earned autonomy. Pay will be tied to performance, so that excellence is recognised and failure has consequences. Tariffs will be reduced to boost productivity. Block contracts will end, with funding tied to outcomes. The plan gives power to the patient, so hospitals are financially rewarded for better service. It closes health inequalities by investing more in working-class communities, and it establishes a national investigation into maternity and neonatal services to deliver the truth, justice and improvement that bereaved families deserve. I am sometimes told that NHS staff are resistant to change. On the contrary, they are crying out for it. They suffer the moral injury of seeing their patients treated in unfit conditions. They are ones driving innovation on the frontline, so their fingerprints are all over this plan. The public are desperate for change too. Each of us has our own story about the NHS and the difference it made to our lives. We also know the consequences of failure. To succeed, we need to defeat the cynicism that says that nothing ever changes. We know that the change in our plan is possible because it is already happening. We have toured the length and breadth of the country and scouted the world for the best examples of reform. If Australia can effectively serve communities living in the outback, we can surely meet the needs of rural England. If community health teams can go door to door to prevent illness in Brazil, we can certainly do the same in Bradford. We know that we can build the neighbourhood health service, because teams in Cornwall, Camden, Northumbria, and Stratford—where I was with the Prime Minister and Chancellor this morning—are already showing us how to do it. We will take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS. We will apply to best examples of innovation from around the world to benefit people here at home. Above all else, we will give power to the patient. This plan fulfils Nye Bevan’s commitment in 1948 to put a megaphone to the mouth of every patient. It will restore the founding promise of the NHS to be there for us when we need it. Of course, we know that there are those on the right who are willing us to fail. They will exploit the crisis in the NHS in order to dismantle it. The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) and his cronies argue that universal healthcare could be afforded in the 20th century but not in the 21st. Labour rejects their declinist pessimism and so do the public. But that is the choice—it is change or bust, and we choose change. We know that the British people are counting on us. It falls to us to ensure that the NHS not only survives but thrives, and we will not let our country down. Of course, if we succeed, we will be able to say with pride that will echo down the decades of the 21st century that we were the generation who built an NHS fit for the future and a fairer Britain where everyone lives well for longer. I commend this statement to the House.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. It is precisely because of examples of the sort that he has shared with the House that we have to get this right, so that we relieve families of such catastrophic care costs. Just as the NHS replaced fear with high-quality care for all, we have to alleviate the fear of families who require care, because the situation that he describes blights too many families across our country.

• 3 Jul 2025 · NHS 10-Year Plan · Hansard source

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  We work closely with NICE to make sure that we consider, in an evidence-based way, the case for prescribing new medicines. We want patients to have access to the latest treatments and technology, and we work with the pharmaceutical industry to get as many medicines as possible to patients. We definitely need growth in this area. I have a counter-offer for the hon. Gentleman. I notice that the Scottish Government are now on their fifth health plan; none of the others has worked. We are always willing to help, and I will put a copy of the plan in the post to my Scottish counterpart, but I will not hold out much hope. In England and Wales, where a Labour Government are in place, waiting lists are falling; in Scotland, waiting lists are rising, and we have heard astonishing admissions of failure from Ministers whose party has been in power for almost 20 years. It is very clear: Scotland needs an alternative. Scotland’s NHS needs an alternative: Scottish Labour.

• 3 Jul 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Responsibly.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  As the hon. Gentleman knows through bitter experience, that rotten industry always finds a way, and we have to keep on top of it and tackle the scourge of nicotine addiction. He knows about this issue better than most, he having campaigned so assiduously on it, and he is right to raise it, so let us look at what we can do to strengthen the Bill, if we can, as it goes through Parliament.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I reassure the right hon. and learned Gentleman, the constituents of his I have met and other campaigners that I am having discussions with the Cabinet Office about how we deal with that and other issues that have been raised this morning, including the sodium valproate scandal. He knows the complexities involved, and I have been grateful for his advice as a former Attorney General. I do not have specific progress to report now, but I reassure him and campaigners that this issue has not gone off the boil and we are working to find a resolution.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Absolutely: the NHS always does better under a Labour Government.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Making sure that women are giving birth safely is the ultimate priority and the least that women deserve. I understand my hon. Friend’s anxiety about this reconfiguration, and she is right to raise that with the ICB in the first instance. We are happy to meet her as Ministers, too. The crucial thing is that the services are configured and delivered in a way that prioritises the safety of women and their babies.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. She is right to highlight the importance of funding following inequalities to redress that imbalance. I think she will be pleased with where we are with the 10-year plan for health, and I would be delighted to meet her to discuss it.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  First, on behalf of the NHS I apologise to my hon. Friend’s constituent. That is an intolerable situation, but sadly not rare or exceptional. There is too much of that happening, and a culture of cover-up and covering reputations, rather than being honest with patients about failures. We are changing the culture. Safety is at the heart of the 10-year plan, and I would be delighted to talk to my hon. Friend further about his constituent’s case.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I should just say for the record that it is thanks to my friends at the Treasury that we are able to do so much to invest in our health service. It is important to put that on record ahead of the Budget. The hon. Lady raises a really serious issue, and we are looking carefully at what we can do to ensure that we get great people into our health service and that they can look forward to a great career. We are not in the right place as a country now; we need to be in a better place. The 10-year plan will set out our ambitions on workforce and we will publish a new workforce plan later this year.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  May I respectfully say that that was part of the problem with Conservative thinking? They thought that the answer to the NHS crisis was more quangos, and they measured success in the number of ICBs, not the number of appointments and the size of the waiting list. We are taking a different approach, slashing bureaucracy and reinvesting in the front line. We are not centralising but decentralising, and cutting waiting lists—a record that the Conservative party cannot begin to touch.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Yes, I will make sure that my hon. Friend gets that meeting.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  That has been a running theme this morning, which will not be lost on Ministers. We will ensure, as we deliver neighbourhood health services, that people can receive care closer to home, wherever they live. We have heard that message loud and clear today, and I think the hon. Member will see that priority reflected in our 10-year plan for health.

• 17 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Can I first thank my hon. Friend the Minister for Care for the considerable amount of work he has done to support the House as it makes its deliberations on this important issue? Of course, the Government are neutral; it is for the House to decide. There is not money allocated to set up the service in the Bill at present, but it is for Members of this House and the other place, should the Bill proceed, to decide whether to proceed. That is a decision that this Government will respect either way.