Labour & the NHS: new year, same dangerous mistakes
The new government is bringing urgently needed energy to the NHS crisis, but the swathe of policy announcements made this week risk repeating pro-privatisation mistakes of the past with dangerous implications for the future of our public health service.
As a new year begins, our NHS has once again been plunged into crisis. This week multiple NHS trusts were forced to declare critical incidents due to “exceptionally high demands” in emergency departments. One patient had to wait 50 hours to be admitted to a ward.
These life-threatening delays are all-too-familiar for patients. The Labour government, who have now been in power for 6 months, have pledged to tackle waiting lists and the NHS backlog. Yet so far, little meaningful progress has been made.
Over the last week Labour have come out with a series of further announcements about their plans to fix the NHS crisis. In this blog we break down what they’re promising, what it means for patients, and what’s missing…
Social care
First up, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced that the government is launching an independent commission to reform social care and create a National Care Service. Everyone knows that fixing social care is an absolutely essential part of rebuilding our health service - the dangerous bottle necks we see in hospitals across the country are so often caused by a lack of beds, which in turn are caused by an inability to discharge vulnerable patients back into the community due to a lack of available care.
So major reform to social care is essential - and it’s also urgent. But here’s the catch. At the same time as announcing this commission, the government also admitted that any reforms would not come into practice until at least 2028.
Three years waiting for a proposal on how to solve the social care crisis, followed by however long it takes to agree and implement a plan, followed by another wait for the effects to kick in is far more years than patients, carers, and the NHS can wait. This huge delay will cost lives. What patients and the NHS really need is a plan funded by progressive taxation, implemented in the next 18 months.
Waiting lists, funding & staffing
A few days later, Keir Starmer announced a plan to reduce waiting lists and tackle hospital backlogs. He said that the new government target is to reach 65% of patients beginning treatment or being given the all clear within 18 weeks by March 2026.
Specific policies in this plan include:
Expanding the network of community diagnostic centres and surgical hubs, to enable more treatment outside of hospitals
An upgrade to the NHS app which will allegedly make it easier to exercise patient choice about where they are treated
More direct referrals for testing and scans
Some of these reforms are welcome, and could make a positive difference to patients. However, as we’ve been saying since day one of the Labour government, reform means nothing without the urgently needed uplifts in the NHS budget after more than a decade of cuts and underfunding. The modest funding increase announced in the Autumn Budget is at best around a quarter of the additional funds the NHS truly needs, according to Health Foundation calculations.
Alongside urgent investment in repairing and increasing hospital capacity, the single most important thing the government could be doing to solve the NHS crisis is investment in tackling the staffing crisis. Yet these plans reflect no policies aimed at improving pay and conditions such that the NHS can retain the people it needs. In fact, it is likely to exacerbate staff shortages as a huge growth in private provision means more staff are set to be poached to work outside the NHS.
Further privatisation
As part of these reforms, Starmer worryingly announced a new deal with the “independent sector” (code for private companies) which will see more NHS patients being treated in profit-making clinics. This will mean that the private sector’s role in cutting NHS waiting lists in England will rise by 20%.
The government is using the crisis in the NHS as an opportunity to dramatically increase the privatisation of our public health service, with one in five non-emergency appointments, tests, and operations set to be performed by private providers. This doubling in the size of privatised NHS care will mean £16bn a year of taxpayer money is diverted from public NHS facilities to fuel corporate profits.
This is an unnecessary, damaging, and ideologically-driven action. This money could be better invested in building up NHS capacity to deliver this care. The private sector will only be able to deliver on it by poaching NHS staff, and it accelerates a vicious cycle that further weakens the NHS and makes it ever more reliant on the private sector. As we’ve said many times before, the private sector is not and never will be the solution!
Tech & accountability
Finally, many people will welcome a far more user friendly and powerful NHS app - if it can be delivered. But there needs to be clear safeguards to ensure it doesn’t exacerbate digital exclusion, or act as a barrier to patients seeing NHS staff face to face if they need to.
Furthermore, the reforms the government has been making in how our health data is used need to be paused to allow for proper consultation on the reality of their implications instead of being rammed through, as we have seen with the Federated Data Platform run by the military spy tech corporation Palantir.
Patients should have a say in how our personal data is used and managed. We want it to be used to benefit health outcomes, not to make money for unaccountable and unethical private corporations!
Amidst plunging polls and favourability, Labour are desperate to convince the British public that they care about the NHS. But the problem is, they continue to repeat the same mistakes of past governments by refusing to meaningfully invest in the NHS and instead diverting public funds into the pockets of private healthcare.
With their major 10 year plan for the NHS set to launch in March, alongside their first Spring Budget, it is vital that Labour correct course by rejecting privatisation and generating new funds for our NHS by taxing corporations and the rich. Just Treatment will continue to fight for these changes - join us.