Health secretary shares light-hearted quip at party’s conference over embattled No 10 aide
Wes Streeting has joked that Keir Starmer’s embattled senior aide Sue Gray also “shot JFK” and was “hiding Lord Lucan” amid a continuing row over her salary.
The health secretary made light of suggestions of mounting acrimony at the heart of government as he spoke at an event on the sidelines of the Labour party conference in Liverpool.
Continue reading...CQC issues damning report on maternity services in England as minister admits anxiety over ‘risk of disaster’
Maternity services in England are so inadequate that cases of women receiving poor care and being harmed in childbirth are in danger of becoming “normalised”, the NHS regulator has said.
A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report based on inspections of 131 maternity units sets out an array of problems, adding to the sense of crisis that has enveloped an NHS service that cares for the 600,000 women a year who give birth and their babies.
Some women, frustrated at facing such long delays in being assessed at triage, discharge themselves before they are seen.
65% of units are not safe for women to give birth in, 47% of trusts are rated as requiring improvement on safety and another 18% are rated as inadequate.
Some hospitals do not record incidents that have resulted in serious harm.
There is a widespread lack of staff and in some places a lack of potentially life-saving equipment.
Hospitals do not always consider women’s suffering after receiving poor care.
Continue reading...Spokesperson for Keir Starmer says focus was instead on encouraging pensioners to seek additional support
Ministers did not carry out a specific impact assessment on the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment from the bulk of pensioners, such as the potential effect on illness and death rates among older people, Downing Street has said.
After days of No 10 refusing to comment, Keir Starmer’s deputy spokesperson said the only assessment made before the policy announcement was a standard legal one of potential equalities impacts.
Continue reading...Britain’s pandemic response was among the worst and the NHS had been ‘seriously weakened’, says leading surgeon
• Three reports lay bare scale of NHS malaise, but will Reeves fund a remedy?
Britain was hit far harder by the Covid-19 pandemic than other developed countries because the NHS had been “seriously weakened” by disastrous government policies over the preceding decade, a wide-ranging report will conclude this week.
An assessment of the NHS by the world-renowned surgeon Prof Ara Darzi, commissioned in July by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, will find that the health service reduced its “routine healthcare activity by a far greater percentage than other health systems” in many key areas during the Covid crisis.
Continue reading...General practices forced to ‘do more and more with less and less’, says Doctors’ Association UK
Labour’s promise to “end the 8am scramble” for medical appointments will be impossible without increasing core funding for GPs, according to a leading medical association.
The health secretary, Wes Streeting, pledged during the general election campaign that Labour would “end the 8am scramble by allowing patients to easily book appointments to see the doctor they want, in the manner they choose”.
Continue reading...Wes Streeting says victims ‘might still be alive’ if health service had recognised Valdo Calocane’s risk to others
The health secretary said “three innocent people might still be alive” if the NHS had “done its job” in treating Valdo Calocane in the years running up to the Nottingham attacks.
Wes Streeting said the deaths of Grace O’Malley-Kumar, Barnaby Webber and Ian Coates were “preventable if the NHS had been there when it should have been”.
Continue reading...Health secretary’s comments follow finding that Care Quality Commission struggling to identify performance issues in hospitals and care homes
Wes Streeting has called England’s healthcare watchdog “not fit for purpose” after an interim report found significant failings were hampering its ability to identify poor performance at hospitals, care homes and GP practices.
The health and social care secretary promised to “grip the crisis” at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) by taking immediate action to increase oversight of the body and giving patients more confidence in their care.
Continue reading...Health secretary understood to be ‘minded’ to make ban permanent as Labour MPs criticise move to retain Tory policy
Wes Streeting is expected to tell MPs his reasons for supporting a ban on puberty blockers being prescribed to children for gender-based reasons, amid discontent in his own party.
After growing criticism among some Labour MPs, the health secretary used social media to defend his backing of an emergency ban on the drugs’ use, imposed by his Conservative predecessor Victoria Atkins, which is being challenged in the high court.
Continue reading...Lack of radiologists blamed for waiting list for diagnostic tests more than doubling in 10 years in England
The waiting lists for diagnostic tests, including cancer scans, is at a record high in NHS England, with doctors warning of a “staggering shortfall” of clinical radiologists.
Figures published on Thursday reveal the diagnostic waiting list stands at 1,658,221 – twice what it was 10 years ago. Nearly 500,000 patients are waiting for CT scans and MRIs.
Continue reading...Parliament the most diverse by race and gender the country has ever seen, says Starmer, with the largest cohort of LGBT+ MPs in the world
Downing Street has released a full version of what Keir Starmer said in his opening remarks to the metro mayors at their meeting this morning. It is not on the No 10 website, so I will post it here.
Having this meeting four days after I was invited by the King to form a government is a real statement of intent on my part, on our part.
Because as we have said over and over again, economy and growth is the number one mission of this Labour government in 2024.
Continue reading...New health secretary aims to resolve dispute in England and warns health service is ‘not good enough’
The new health secretary, Wes Streeting, has declared the NHS is broken as he announced that talks with junior doctors in England would restart next week.
The Ilford North MP said patients were not receiving the care they deserved and the performance of the NHS was “not good enough”.
Continue reading...Music teacher Nathaniel Dye, 38, who had spoken about delays for treatment, gave update on Tuesday
A man who had a terminal cancer diagnosis, and who described Labour as “the party of hope for a brighter future I won’t live to see” at the party’s manifesto launch, is now cancer-free.
Nathaniel Dye, a 38-year-old music teacher, was diagnosed with stage four incurable bowel cancer in October 2022, and tumours were understood to have spread to his lungs, liver and lymph nodes.
Continue reading...Prime minister faces claim Tories are ‘stealing the candlesticks’ on the way out of government
After a passage in his speech attack Labour on familiar grounds, Rishi Sunak also hit out at Reform UK.
[Reform UK] are not on the side of who you think they are.
Reform are standing candidates here in Scotland that are pro independence and anti monarchy.
Continue reading...Wes Streeting says another Conservative term could result in waiting list swelling to 10m cases
Labour has promised to clear the NHS waiting list backlog in England within five years, with Wes Streeting warning that the health service risks becoming “a poor service for poor people” while the wealthy shift to using private care.
In an interview with the Guardian, the shadow health secretary said that in another Conservative term the total waiting list in England could grow to 10m cases, with healthcare becoming as degraded as NHS dental services.
Continue reading...Shadow minister says it is Justin Welby’s job to speak out but Labour could not commit to scrapping policy
The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has praised the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, for calling on Labour to scrap the two-child benefit cap, saying it was “literally his job” to speak out on such matters.
Streeting said he did not like the cap, which campaigners say has pushed hundreds of thousands of families into poverty, but that the party could not commit to ending it until it knew how this would be financed.
Continue reading...Party says pooling resources across regions would deliver 40,000 extra appointments a week for patients
Hospitals would have to share waiting lists and pool resources under Labour’s plans to reduce waiting times by delivering up to 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week.
The party has announced that patients would be offered appointments at nearby hospitals, rather than necessarily at their local one, which would enable people to receive faster treatment. Hospital staff and resources would be pooled across a region and would run evening and weekend surgeries.
Continue reading...Tory sources allege that Dover MP Natalie Elphicke crossed the floor because she was not given a post running housing policy
Tory defector Natalie Elphicke stormed out of the party and joined Labour because she was “bitter” about being denied a ministerial job in charge of housing policy, senior Conservative sources have told the Observer.
It is understood that Elphicke was considered for a government job first by Liz Truss when she became prime minister in 2022 but was not in the end given a post. Elphicke then made clear her ambition to become a minister under Rishi Sunak, but again was unsuccessful.
Continue reading...British PM says he will speak to Netanyahu to express solidarity and discuss how further escalation can be avoided
UK general election opinion poll tracker: Labour leading as election looms
David Cameron ruled out trying to become PM again in an interview this morning. (See 9.30am.) But Liz Truss has not done so. In an interview with LBC’s Iain Dale, being broadcast tonight, she did not entirely dismiss the possibility. This is from LBC’s Henry Riley.
Truss is giving interviews to publicise her memoir which is out this week. According to extracts sent out in advance, she also confirmed in her LBC interview that she wanted to see Donald Trump win the US presidential election. She said:
I don’t think [Joe] Biden has been particularly supportive to the United Kingdom. I think he’s often on the side of the EU. And I certainly think I would like to see a new president in the White House …
The thing I would say about Donald Trump is, because I served as secretary of state under both Trump and Biden, and Trump’s policies were actually very effective. If you look at his economic policies, and I met his regulatory czar, I travelled around the United States looking at what he’d done. He cut regulation, he cut taxes, he liberated the US energy supply. And this is why the US has had significantly higher economic growth than Britain.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Failure to do so would betray working-class people, shadow health secretary says
Wes Streeting has defended Labour’s plans to use the private sector to help cut the NHS care backlog, arguing that a failure to do so would result in a “betrayal” of working-class people who cannot afford to pay for care.
The shadow health secretary said his approach was a “pragmatic but principled one” as he doubled down on his remarks this week about “middle-class lefties” whom he said risked putting ideological purity ahead of patient care.
Continue reading...Length of time patients must wait for A&E care, diagnostic tests, cancer care and surgery will remain high, report predicts
The NHS hospital waiting list will be falling “consistently” by the time of the general election but will remain even larger than it was before Covid until 2030, a new report predicts.
In potentially good news for Rishi Sunak, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the waiting list for operations in England is expected to “start to fall consistently but slowly from the middle of 2024”, during the months leading up to the election, which is widely expected in November.
Continue reading...