Labour will tell NHS staff to work weekends
Streeting vows to protect whistleblowers and cut reliance on migrants in healthcare plan
NHS staff will be told to work evenings and weekends under Labour plans to shorten waiting lists, Wes Streeting has announced.
Neighbouring hospitals will also be asked to share staff and pool their waiting lists as part of a £1.1billion drive to provide an extra 40,000 appointments a week, under the shadow health secretary’s plans.
Overtime pay rates will be offered to NHS staff who agree to pick up any extra shifts.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Streeting today reveals that senior NHS leaders who silence whistleblowers will be sacked and barred from working for the health service again under Labour. He also says the NHS is “over-reliant” on migrant workers – which he describes as “problematic” – and would like to see the number brought down.
Mr Streeting says he “shares Treasury cynicism” about how the NHS spends money, adding that levels of productivity in the health service must improve.
Earlier this week, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, unveiled the policies at the centre of his general election campaign with a Blair-style pledge card. One of Sir Keir’s six pledges was to cut NHS waiting times by scheduling 40,000 more appointments each week. He said this would be paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and nondom loopholes.
Mr Streeting says he intends to oversee “the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history”, claiming it is “a plan so good that the Conservative Government did a smash-and-grab on it”.
He adds that it will take time to recruit more doctors, nurses and midwives, “but in the meantime there are practical things that can and should be done to get patients seen faster”.
Under Labour’s plan, hospitals will run evening and weekend surgeries, which the party believes would allow them to do a week’s worth of operations in one day. Staff and resources would be pooled across several hospitals for these shifts. Patients would be offered appointments at nearby hospitals, allowing them to be treated faster.
Earlier this week, a group of doctors warned that NHS managers were destroying the careers of whistleblowers who raised concerns about patient safety.
More than 50 doctors and nurses told The Telegraph they had been targeted after raising concerns about more than 170 patient deaths and nearly 700 cases of poor care.
Asked what he would do about that, Mr Streeting says: “Senior leaders who silence whistleblowers will be sacked – and they will not work in the NHS again. We’ve seen review after review, report after report, about the culture in the NHS and the silencing of whistleblowers. This is a matter of patient safety – in some cases, it has been a matter of life and death. Unless we are robust about this, we’re not going to see the culture change that the NHS desperately needs.”
NHS figures published earlier this year revealed that one in five NHS staff in England was a non-UK national. Healthcare workers from 214 countries are employed in the health service and the proportion of roles filled by non-British nationals has risen to a record high.
“The NHS is over-reliant on migrant workers,” says Mr Streeting. “That’s problematic for three reasons. Firstly, we are recruiting from countries on the World Health Organisation red list with severe healthcare shortages of their own. So it’s unethical.
“Secondly, we are turning away thousands of straight-A students from studying medicine each year because we’re capping their aspiration, and there has been a short-termist mindset that says ‘don’t bother training our own homegrown talent, we’ll recruit from overseas’.
“I think that is deeply unfair on bright UK students who could serve the NHS.
“And thirdly, it’s a long-term risk to the country because there is a global
‘This plan is so good that the Conservative Government did a smash-and-grab on it’
shortage of healthcare workers, so we should not assume that we will always be able to draw on that global workforce. So there’s a strategic risk there, too.”
He says it is “part of my job” to assist with bringing down net migration and “reducing reliance on workers from overseas”.
Mr Streeting also delivers a tough message to the NHS about its productivity levels, saying: “I want to send the strongest possible signal to the Department of Health and NHS England this side of the election.
“When it comes to Treasury cynicism about the NHS – how it spends money and to what effect – I share the Treasury’s cynicism. And when it comes to improving NHS productivity, Rachel Reeves and I will be working in lockstep to repair the relationship between the Treasury and the Department of Health, but even more importantly to deliver better results for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money.”
An internal NHS review into efficiency found hospitals were struggling to treat more people despite higher funding and extra staff because thousands more patients were stranded on wards with nowhere to go.
Mr Streeting said he had been “inundated” with responses to his recent call to NHS staff to let him know of “everyday working practice that drives you up the wall – that is wasting your time, wasting patients’ time, wasting public money”.
He said these ranged from wasting time trying to book leave on outdated HR systems to having to re-order handwritten notes that had been scanned in the wrong order.
WES STREETING has one message for possible defectors. “My DMs are open,” he says, referring to direct messages privately sent on social media.
The shadow health secretary revealed that he is talking to multiple MPs from the moderate One Nation faction of the Conservative Party who are wrestling with their conscience over whether to cross the floor.
Speaking to The Telegraph during a visit to King George Hospital in his constituency of Ilford North, he said: “I think the dilemma, particularly One Nation Conservatives have, is do they stay and fight and try and turn the Conservative Party around in opposition?
“Or do they roll their sleeves up and try and be part of turning this country round as part of a Labour team? And that’s a dilemma that only they can answer in their own heads.”
Last month, Dan Poulter defected to Labour claiming that it was the only party that could “cure” the NHS. He was followed by Natalie Elphicke, whose welcome to Sir Keir Starmer’s party was mixed to say the least. Many MPs on the left of the Labour Party question why someone who is seen as being from the Tory Right should be welcomed into the fold.
But Mr Streeting, who has been tipped as a future Labour leader, said he “couldn’t be happier” about the defections.
“They’re making a journey that we want millions of Conservative voters to undertake,” he said, adding that Labour is “really serious about building a big tent that people feel welcome and feel part of”.
In what might be seen as an overture to the very One Nation Tories he is speaking to about defecting, he went on to sing the praises of Lord Cameron and contrast him to the “cast of clowns” lining up to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
“One of the fascinating things about David Cameron being back in government, as Foreign Secretary, is that every time he pops up on the telly, you’re reminded of what the Conservative Party used to look like,” Mr Streeting said.
“And the contrast couldn’t be sharper between the quality of David Cameron and the quality of Rishi Sunak, the quality of David Cameron and the quality of Suella Braverman, the quality of David Cameron and the quality of any number of the cast of clowns who may aspire to lead the Conservative Party after the next general election.”
He declined to put an exact number on the number of Tories he is speaking to about crossing the floor, saying he did not want to add to the speculation as he wanted them to have the “time and space” to make some “tough choices”.
Mr Streeting has been shadow health secretary since November 2021, and in that time he has come up with a raft of policy proposals for how he would run the flailing NHS.
“I’m not pussyfooting around and waiting for the general election to get things done,” he says as he explains his latest coup: securing a partnership with Nuffield Health’s charitable arm to get thousands of NHS staff suffering joint pain back to work.
His team identified that back problems and other musculoskeletal problems are the second-most common reason for sickness absence in the NHS, after mental health.
A record 198,000 days were missed by NHS workers with problems including arthritis and knee, hip and neck aches in December 2023, up 13 per cent on the 174,000 recorded in the same month in 2019.
Labour’s new initiative will see Nuffield Health’s Joint Pain Programme open up 4,000 extra places for NHS staff free of charge. which they say will allow those suffering with joint pain to stay in, or return to work, and in turn, help beat the backlog.
“I know that staff sickness and absence is a big challenge for the NHS as it is right across the economy,” he said. “And in particular, a big cause of NHS staff absence is people suffering with joint pain. So we’ve made this agreement with Nuffield Health, which will be brilliant for both staff and help them back to work more quickly and to recover more quickly, which is brilliant for patients.”
Earlier this week, Esther McVey, the Cabinet Secretary, announced that rainbow lanyards are to be banned in the Civil Service, warning mandarins they should not try to express political views “by the back door”.
Should rainbow lanyards be banned in the NHS? “No,” Mr Streeting says. “It would be the policy of the Labour government to support LGBT equality and inclusion that also happens to be the law of the land.” But he added: “I don’t think that people should be wearing their politics around their neck in a workplace.”
He said he agreed with the Health Secretary’s recently announced changes to the NHS Constitution which will see terms like “chestfeeding” banned and that same-sex wards should be based on biological sex rather than gender identity.
But he laid the blame for creeping “wokery” in the NHS at the door of the Government. “The irony about the Government’s approach is that this has all happened on their watch,” he said.
“And you would think that the Labour Party has been in power in the last 14 years. This has happened on their watch and it’s nice that for once the Conservatives are trying to clean up the mess they’ve made.”
Mr Streeting is one of several Labour MPs who will be challenged at the general election by an independent candidate running on a Gaza ticket.
The recent local elections saw Labour’s support fall away among large swathes of Muslim voters as they chose instead to back independent candidates who attacked Sir Keir’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war.
He admits Labour has “struggled” with some voters and explains: “There’s a demand for Keir Starmer and David Lammy to speak with the language and the passion of the protesters. Whereas I think Keir and David, as our country’s potential Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, have a duty to speak in the language of diplomacy. And I think that’s at the heart of the tension that we face.”