SOS NHS coalition members respond to the government's NHS Long Term Plan
This isn’t transformation, it’s managed decline which puts profits before patients.
As frontline NHS workers, patients, campaigners and public interest groups, we are voicing our deep concern over the government’s dangerous long term strategy for our NHS. This is a fantasy plan built on unproven technology, reliant on workforce cuts and wishful thinking, which sidesteps the real crisis of underfunding and understaffing whilst handing ever-increasing resources and power over to profit-making companies.
Despite a reported funding shortfall estimated by the British Medical Association at £423 billion since 2009, the plan leans heavily on three flawed assumptions: that community care, prevention, and digital technology can solve the crisis without any significant new investment.
But we know that the numbers tell a different story: fewer beds, fewer staff, flat capital budgets, and no boost to community services. With record waiting lists, worsening health inequalities, and a workforce on the brink, the plan includes no increase in capital investment, no proper funding for community-based services, and no dedicated, credible workforce strategy.
At a time when the Royal College of Emergency Medicine says 13,000 more beds and tens of thousands more staff are urgently needed, the plan pushes for more elective operations in the private sector. Increased reliance on private providers will hurt, not help, our NHS in the long term. It will reduce NHS capacity while leaving complex, costly cases to already overstretched NHS teams. Staffing shortages, already crippling the system, will deepen further.
The government is justifying their underfunding by asserting a deeply flawed claim: that NHS care in 2010 delivered quality services despite below-average European funding - implying that increased investment is neither needed nor desirable. This flies in the face of well-established evidence. Blair-era investment to match EU averages delivered the longest sustained improvement in NHS history. Reversing this approach now, after a pandemic and over a decade of austerity, is a betrayal of both patients and staff.
The plan’s reliance on expensive medicines, AI and digital tools - like the NHS App replacing GPs or “virtual hospitals” bypassing primary care - signals an untested experiment with no clinical evidence base which seems to be motivated in large part by a desire to fuel economic growth and meet the demands of big tech and pharmaceutical corporation lobbyists. It gambles the future of patient care on unproven systems, without honest reflection on the likely costs of this tech, and despite serious concerns about accuracy, bias and safety, while ignoring social care entirely. It also proposes mass genome sequencing of babies, raising deep ethical and practical questions.
This is a plan that talks up transformation, but retreats from the values that underpin the NHS: universal, comprehensive, publicly funded and publicly provided care. As members of the SOS NHS coalition, we are united in calling for a real plan, one that confronts the workforce crisis, invests in infrastructure, fixes social care, and puts patients - not profits - at the centre of care.