Repairing our precious NHS

We inherited a broken NHS. But our plan for change is working.

We inherited a ludicrous situation where patients couldn’t get a GP appointment, while GPs couldn’t get a job. By cutting red tape and investing more in our NHS, we have put an extra 1,503 GPs into general practice. The recruitment boost will help to end the scandal of patients struggling to see a doctor, easing pressure on GPs and cutting waiting lists.

Alongside changes to the GP contract for 2025 to 2026, these additional GPs will help end the 8am scramble for appointments, which so many of us currently endure every day. As people more readily receive the timely care they deserve from their local practice this will us to achieve our aim of shifting healthcare from hospitals to the community, which will in turn help to bring down waiting lists.

We inherited record and ever-increasing NHS waiting lists – with over seven million people left waiting in pain – unable to work or get on with their lives. During the general election I could almost guarantee on every campaign session I would meet someone on the doorstep waiting for treatment. Many of them were so frustrated they had started to believe the doom-mongers, like Nigel Farage who claimed the NHS was finished and needed to be replaced with an insurance-based system.

Generations of my family have worked in the NHS and I will never give up on it. And less than a year in NHS waiting lists are no longer rising. In fact, they have fallen for 6 months in a row. To get waiting lists falling we promised to deliver 2 million extra appointments in our first year. We have in fact delivered 3 million more and we’re not done yet.

So many of you told me that we were wasting money in the NHS on managers and bureaucracy. We’ve acted on that too. We’ve scrapped NHS England, the world’s largest quango set up by the Conservatives. This will cut 10,000 NHS manager jobs, reduce duplication, increase accountability and enable us to move millions of pounds to fund frontline services.

It is only because of the necessary decisions we have taken, like increasing employer National Insurance Contributions, that we have been able to start to turn the NHS around so that it delivers for patients. There will no doubt be bumps in the road but the reform and extra investment we are making will get the NHS back on its feet and make it fit for the future.