'Fund the NHS properly': Private sector is not the answer, Wes Streeting told, amid funding row

Labour shadow minister Wes Streeting has warned that the NHS will get no extra funding from Labour without “major surgery” – but campaigners and unions warn that the plans could see doctors “spread even more thin.”

The shadow health secretary has said would not be put off by “middle-class Lefties” who accuse him of “betrayal” for using the private sector to bring down waiting lists.

“The NHS is a service, not a shrine. It is judged by how well it serves the public, not how heavy a price we’re paying for failure,” he wrote in the Sun.

Streeting said that a promised £1.1bn of funding will only come with an agreement to get the NHS operating throughout the weekend to slash lists.

He also vowed to use “spare capacity in the private sector” to the same end, and to digitise health records through the NHS app

But unions and focus groups have criticised his comments – urging him not to “leak out NHS profits” by ramping up privatisation.

“The NHS is not solely the concern of so-called ‘middle class lefties’, it concerns absolutely everyone,” said Johnbosco Nwogbo, lead health campaigner at We Own It.

“And increasing outsourcing to private healthcare providers is not the answer. The solution is funding the NHS properly and investing so that it can develop its own capacity.”

Dr Julia Grace Patterson, chief executive of the Every Doctor campaign, described the comments as “incredibly inflammatory.”

“It’s divisive and unhelpful to try and pit one group of voters against another,” she said. “Particularly at a time when millions of people are unable to access the treatment they need in the NHS.”

“If Wes Streeting is seeking solutions to the problems in the NHS, he should commit to a significant pay rise for NHS staff, he should commit investment to fix crumbling buildings, and he should commit to ending private outsourcing.”

What has gone wrong with the NHS?

As recently as 2014, a Commonwealth Fund study ranked the NHS as the best healthcare system in the world and the second-cheapest of those analysed.

After years of of Tory underfunding, the NHS is in crisis. Around 7.61 million people are on elective waiting lists in England alone, while A&E wait times are creeping up.

The median waiting time for all patients increased from two hours nine minutes in May 2011 to three hours four minutes in November 2023. And a staggering 1.5 million patients in England waited 12 hours or more after arriving at A&E over the past year.

Labour has promised to fix these issues if they are elected, with proposed reforms including requiring doctors to work weekend shifts and using spare capacity in the private sector.

“Pouring more money in without reform would be like pouring water into a leaky bucket,” Wes Streeting wrote in the Sun.

Nwogbo agrees that the current system isn’t working – but says that using the private sector is not the answer.

“Outsourcing leads to poorer quality care for patients,” Nwogbo said. “A recent University of Oxford study published in Lancet Public Health has linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.”

Labour could “reclaim its mantle as the party of the NHS,” Nwogbo said, if it pledged to reverse private profiteering in the NHS by bringing all contracts back in-house, supported by £40bn more per year in annual funding.

This sounds like a staggering amount, but the campaigners claim it would bring us on par with our European counterparts.

“According to Health Foundation and analysis, France spends £40bn more per year on health care than we do. Germany spends around £73bn more than we do. We must catch up,” Nwogbo said.

The British Medical Association agreed that the NHS needs to be reformed, but questioned the focus of Streeting’s reforms.

“At a time when waiting lists are at near-record highs, we recognise the need to use all available capacity, but increased use of the independent sector must be time-limited and cannot be a replacement for a longer-term credible plan to increase NHS capacity,” said Dr Latifa Patel, BMA representative body chair.

“There are workforce shortages and pressures across the board, with both the NHS and the private sector drawing from the same limited pool of doctors. Therefore, suggestions of ‘spare capacity’ need to be handled with a dose of realism. It should not be a case of shifting the problem to the private sector while making little difference to the overall backlog.”

More operations at weekends is a “fine ambition,” Patel added – but “where will the extra staff come from?”

“The doctors and healthcare workers needed are the same people exhausted from working all week – would Mr Streeting’s plan be to spread us even more thinly than we already are?”