The health secretary Wes Streeting has claimed the NHS will effectively “go bust” unless the government takes action, and soon.
The cabinet minister’s remarks come ahead of a landmark report into the health service from Lord Darzi, a leading surgeon, commissioned by the government in July.
Darzi’s report is expected to say the NHS reduced its “routine healthcare activity by a far greater percentage than other health systems” in many key areas during the Covid pandemic – and that the service is still suffering as a result.
The crossbench peer, who was a minister in the last Labour government but who has since left the party, has also warned the NHS was “seriously weakened” by disastrous government policies over the last decade.
Speaking to LBC’s Sunday with Lewis Goodall, Streeting said: “If we do not act now to make the right long-term decisions, we will end up with the NHS effectively going bust.”
He added that Darzi’s report will show the NHS was “so badly prepared and resourced before the pandemic, we ended up cancelling more operations and appointments and procedures than any other major country”.
While he suggested that investment and reform were needed to “deliver results” within the health service, Streeting added that the NHS was “broken by the botched reforms of the previous government”.
PM Keir Starmer also told the BBC in his first major interview since getting into No.10 that the NHS had been “broken” by past governments.
“Everybody watching this who has used the NHS, or whose relatives have, knows that it’s broken. That is unforgivable, the state of our NHS,” he said.
Starmer added: “Our job now, through Lord Darzi, is properly to understand how that came about and bring about the reforms, starting with the first steps, the 40,000 extra appointments.”
Meanwhile, shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins has denied the Tories had broken the service, instead pointing to Darzi’s findings that more than 100,000 infants were left waiting for more than six hours in A&E departments in 2023.
She told broadcasters: “Labour’s instinct is to politicise children’s health rather than provide solutions and reform our NHS.”
A Tory Party spokesman also defended their record in government, telling the Guardian: “The NHS has more doctors, more nurses, more funding in real terms and is looking after more people than ever before.”
They added that the NHS looked after millions during the pandemic, and rolled out vaccines “faster than anyone else in the world” – and set up the Public Inquiry.
They added: “It is odd that this former Labour minister and peer feels he is in a better position to opine on Covid than the Public Inquiry.”
The health spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, said that “years and years of Conservative failure have brought the NHS to its knees” and called for “an emergency health budget from this new government.”