NHS waiting lists could go up even more, health minister says on 75th anniversary – UK politics live | Politics

Yesterday Sajid Javid, the Tory former health secretary, called for the creation of a royal commission to consider the future of the NHS. He argued that this would take the debate about the future of the service out of the realm of party politics, and, in an article in the Times, he said that in private politicians believed that the NHS was unsustainable in its current form. He said:

Of course, as we approach that next general election, political parties will energetically debate the future of the NHS. But behind closed doors, they know the current set-up is unsustainable. Saying that publicly is much more difficult.

In an interview this morning Maria Caulfield, the health minister, dismissed the idea. A royal commission would take “an awful long time”, she told Times Radio. She went on:

We are investing now and building a workforce for the future. So I’m very confident that in 25 years time, the NHS will be thriving.

Rishi Sunak should be apologising to the country about the state of the NHS, not celebrating it, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary said today.

Speaking on GB News, he said:

I don’t begrudge NHS staff past and present celebrating the enormous contribution they make and the NHS has made to our country over the last 75 years.

What I do begrudge is the prime minister and other government ministers out celebrating, because when you look at the state the NHS is in today objectively we have the worst crisis in its history, the shortest or the lowest patient satisfaction ever and the highest waiting lists on record.

That’s really not something I think this government should be celebrating. If anything, they should be apologising to the country for the state that they’ve left the NHS in.

The Guardian has been given exclusive access to the health service in Tredegar, the south Wales town that forged the NHS. The NHS was launched in 1948 by the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, inspired in part by the Tredegar Medical Aid Society in his birthplace and constituency. It has since saved the lives of millions and inspired health systems around the world.

Seventy-five years on, the Guardian found residents, patients and staff still proud of Bevan’s legacy, but anxious about the future of the NHS.

John McDonnell, who was shadow chancellor when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, has accused Keir Starmer of being on a “search and destroy” mission against the left in his party.

He made the comment in an interview with BBC’s Newsnight, in which he urged Starmer to be more tolerant of alternative views.

For months there have been complaints about how leftwingers in the party are being refused to the right to stand as candidates, or otherwise obstructed in internal selection contests. Some Corbynites have been expelled.

Concern about this trend escalated last week when Neal Lawson, head of the centre-left pressure group Compass, was told he was at risk of being expelled. Lawson is not a leftwinger in Labour terms, but he is a long-term advocate of pluralism and electoral reform (a cause not supported by Starmer).

Lawson faces being thrown out of the party because he retweeted approvingly a tweet two years ago from the Lib Dem MP Layla Moran about Green/Lib Dem cooperation in council elections. He says he was just making a general point about his support for progressive parties cooperating, but his tweet has been interpreted as Lawson not backing the Labour candidate in the contest referenced by Moran.

McDonnell told Newsnight:

I think what [Starmer has] allowed to happen is a rightwing faction become drunk with power and use devices within the party almost on a search and destroy of the left.

They seem to be more interested in destroying the presence of the left of the party than in getting a Labour government.

McDonell also said this did not happen under Tony Blair.

Under Tony Blair we didn’t have mass expulsions like this or anything like that.

We didn’t have the withdrawal of the whip unless it was something very extreme. There was an atmosphere of tolerance but actually respect as well.

In response, a Labour spokesperson said:

The public need to know that if someone is a Labour candidate that is a mark of quality they can rely on. It’s absolutely right that we have high standards for those who are going to represent the Labour party at election time.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, and other faith leaders have criticised the illegal migration bill on the grounds that it lets down “the most vulnerable” and “fails to meet the basic test of an evidence-based and workable policy”.

In a letter to the Times, they say an international approach to the refugee crisis is needed and they urge the government to take a lead in finding one. They say:

With more than 100 million people displaced around the world, this crisis will not be solved without significant collective endeavour.

To improve the bill, we support an amendment requiring the government to produce a ten-year strategy, collaborating internationally to stop the boats here and globally, and tackle refugee crises and human trafficking.

The UK should take a lead in setting out a just, compassionate approach, ensuring that people seeking sanctuary are protected, claims decided quickly and justly, human traffickers are punished, and the root causes of mass migration are properly addressed.

Welby has tabled amendments to the bill to achieve this, and he is expected to speak about them in the debate in the Lords this afternoon.

The Times letter has also been signed by representatives of the Salvation Army, Progressive Judaism, the Hindu Forum of Britain, the Network of Sikh Organisations UK, Makkah Mosque and the Scottish Ahlul Bayt Society.

The Tony Blair Institute, the eponymous thinktank run by the former prime minister, has published a report today setting out how he thinks the NHS should be reformed. As Denis Campbell reports, it advocates greater use of private healthcare firms to provide services for NHS patients (something Blair championed when he was in office).

The report is not about charging patients. It says being “free at the point of use and funded through general taxation” should remain the principle at the heart of the health service, and it warns that if the NHS does not reform, the private sector will benefit.

But it does suggest using the NHS app, and NHS “personal health accounts” (which it advocates), to make it easier for people to access certain health services for which they might pay. In his forward to the report, Blair writes.

There should be active encouragement of new providers to enter the system, particularly for high-volume, low-complexity services, many of which can now be provided digitally. The NHS App is creating a vibrant marketplace for digital providers to enter the NHS centrally in ways that were not possible before, creating opportunities for greater choice and competition; and for partnership between the private health sector and the NHS. This can include the availability of co-payment options to expand more rapidly or offer additional features.

By “high-volume, low-complexity”, Blair is referring to services like dermatology and physiotherapy.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, was asked if he favoured people paying to access some health services. He rejected the idea, saying:

I think we’ve already got a two-tier system in this country where people who can afford it are paying to go private and those who can’t are being left behind.

Good morning. The NHS is celebrating its 75th anniversary today, but “celebrating” might not be the most appropriate word. There are strong grounds for believing it’s in a grim state, and they have been set out this morning in a powerful letter to political leaders from three leading health thinktanks.

In the letter, the King’s Fund, the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation say the NHS is “in a critical condition”. They acknowledge that public support for the institution is “rock solid”. But they say that, unless it gets investment and reform, it faces “managed decline that gradually erodes the guarantee of safety in place of fear it was designed to create”.

The full letter is here. And here is an extract:

The NHS has endured a decade of under-investment compared to the historic average, and capital spending has been well below comparable countries. As a result, the health service has insufficient resources to do its job: fewer hospital beds than almost all similar countries, outdated equipment, dilapidated buildings and failing IT. Despite long-term objectives to reduce reliance on acute hospitals and move care closer to people’s homes, spending continues to flow in the opposite direction. Long-term thinking is essential to meet the challenges ahead – from responding to changing health needs to harnessing AI and new technology …

Long-term political action is also needed to address the fraying health of the UK population. The NHS was not set up to go it alone. Protecting and improving people’s health depends on a wider system of services and support that includes local government and social security. Yet people are falling between the cracks of public services and the NHS is often left to pick up the pieces …

Persisting with the current addiction to short-termism and eye-catching initiatives will risk the health service being unable to adapt to the huge challenges ahead and reach its centenary. It is time to move away from quick fixes and over-promising what the NHS can deliver and give it the tools it needs to succeed.

This morning Maria Caulfield, a health minister, has been giving interviews. She was asked about the recent figures showing that a record 7.4 million people in England are on an NHS waiting list, and she said the figure could go up. Speaking to Sky News, she said:

To patients, what matters is how long they’re waiting. They’re not really worried about who else is on the waiting list. They want to know when their procedure or operation is happening, and we’ve significantly reduced that delay. We’ve virtually eliminated a two-year wait.

Asked again about the 7.4 million figure, she said:

That probably will go up higher because we are offering more procedures.

This was interesting, for two reasons.

First, and most obviously, Caulfield was admitting that Rishi Sunak is currently not on track to meet his pledge to reduce waiting lists. This is obvious to anyone who has looked at the figures, but getting ministers to admit the obvious is not always straightforward.

Second, and more interestingly, Caulfield seemed – intentionally or not – to be redefining the pledge. In his announcement in January Sunak said: “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.” Asked to explain it at his press conference, he refused to set a timescale for when he expected the number of people on the headline waiting list to go down.

But he also mentioned subsidiary targets, reducing the amount of time people spend waiting for an operation, and he did set deadlines for these targets. He said he wanted waits lasting more than 18 months to be eliminated by April. (This target was narrowly missed.) By next spring he wanted waits of more than a year to be eliminated, he said.

Today Caulfield seemed to be saying that these are the targets that matter most. “To patients, what matters is how long they’re waiting. They’re not really worried about who else is on the waiting list.”

She may be right. But this is not what Sunak told the nation in January.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11am: Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are among those attending a service at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the NHS.

12pm: Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, faces Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, at PMQs.

1pm: Claire Coutinho, the education minister, gives a speech on free speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank.

After 3pm: Peers begin the third day of the report stage debate on the illegal migration bill.

If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a PC or a laptop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.