Dan Aldridge: ‘Labour is getting our NHS back on track’

After 14 years of mismanagement, and eye-watering disregard for public money by the previous government, the scale of the challenge is daunting, but a Labour Government fixed the NHS before, delivering the highest patient-satisfaction and lowest waiting lists on record in 2010, we will fix it again.

Where has the money gone?

Just last week I attended the launch of Transparency International’s report into corruption during the pandemic. The event in Parliament was shocking in its clarity and candour, identifying “significant concerns in contracts worth over £15.3bn awarded by the Conservative government during the Covid pandemic, equivalent to one in every £3 spent”.

The report went further to say, “the suspension of normal safeguards was often unjustifiable, costing the public purse billions and eroding trust in political institutions”.

The previous government’s dire record on the NHS is seen in projects such as the failed Covid-19 Test and Trace system, ran by Baroness Diana ‘Dido’ Harding, wife of former Weston-super-Mare MP John Penrose.

Test and Trace had an eye-watering two-year budget of £37 billion, yet Parliament’s own cross-party Public Accounts Committee investigation found that despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project, largely outsourced to private contractors with many routinely paid over £1000 per day: “Test and Trace could not point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic”.

A catastrophic failure and unconscionable waste of public money.

What I find particularly frustrating for us in Weston, is that the man tasked with tackling corruption under Boris Johnson during this time was our former MP John Penrose.

We are in a truly difficult financial situation because of the shocking state of the public finances left by the previous government, and public trust is through the floor, but we have to be honest with the public about the challenges we face as a society, but also what we see as the way out of this mess.

Fair pay for our NHS staff

The first step to healing our country was to end the most devastating disputes in the NHS’s history and getting the waiting lists down.

We have now secured fair pay-deals for millions of NHS workers and junior doctors, the people we went out on the streets, week-after-week, to clap for during lockdowns. Now, finally, they have appreciation they can pay their bills with.

The reality of not settling these disputes fairly, would be another winter with millions more appointments and operations cancelled or postponed, and billions of taxpayer money wasted, again.

How we fix it

This Government recognises that we can’t return our country to prosperity without a functioning NHS. We also cannot fix our NHS by simply ploughing more money into it without serious, evidence-based reform. 

That is why immediately after the election, we commissioned a report, conducted by the independent peer and surgeon Professor Lord Darzi, to identify the key problems within our NHS. 

Last week, Professor Lord Darzi’s report was published, and it lays out the mammoth task ahead. 

14 years of mismanagement has left us with a healthcare system on the brink.

A lack of investment has meant we are now 15 years behind the private sector in developing new technologies to treat illnesses. 

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic inevitably brought huge pressures to the system, but the disastrous top-down reorganisation under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition Government left us with an NHS that was simply unable to cope, leading to worse outcomes here than in other countries with similar healthcare systems. 

The Darzi report found that the crisis in A&E is particularly acute, with extra waiting times causing an additional 14,000 deaths per year.

Patients are much more likely to die from cancer than other nations, whilst children and adults are less healthy now than they were 10 years ago. 

A failure to properly reform our health system over the past 14 years has left us with no alternative but to act decisively to save it and early next year, we will publish a detailed 10-year plan which sets out how this Labour Government will fundamentally reform our NHS. 

Our focus will be on three key areas: 

1. Returning healthcare to local communities such as Weston, by investing in neighbourhood healthcare such as Graham Road Surgery, that meet patients where they live
2. Realising the enormous potential that technology and life sciences can bring to healthcare, ensuring that patients can quickly access new treatments and medicines quickly
3. Shifting focus to the prevention of illness, because prevention is better than a cure

There will be no quick fixes, no easy solutions - but with hard work and commitment we will make the tough decisions needed to properly fix our NHS and deliver the care that patients and families in Weston, and across the country need.