Reform or die: Starmer promises 10-year plan to fix health service

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised on Thursday to deliver a 10-year plan to fix the National Health Service, saying there would be no more money without reform to a system an independent report found to be in critical condition.

The state-run NHS has been in crisis and endured some of its toughest winters in recent years, struggling to recover from the impacts of COVID-19, long backlogs for elective procedures and industrial action.

Starmer, whose Labour Party won a landslide victory in a July election, said the NHS needed “major surgery not sticking plaster solutions” to cope with the rising costs of looking after an ageing population without hiking taxes.

“Working people can’t afford to pay more, so it’s reform or die,” Starmer said, adding he knew the changes would not be universally popular.

“Only fundamental reform and a plan for the long term can turn around the NHS and build a healthy society. That won’t be easy, it won’t be quick. It will take a 10-year plan.”

He offered few details of the plan, or when a concrete blueprint would be released.

Starmer has said the previous Conservative government “broke the NHS”, part of an inheritance he describes as one of the worst across the board from prisons to immigration.

The damning report by Ara Darzi, a surgeon who sits in the House of Lords upper house of parliament, found the NHS entered the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with resilience at an “all-time low”, due to a lack of investment and a confused top-down reorganisation in the decade beforehand.

“Far too many people are waiting for too long and in too many clinical areas, quality of care has gone backwards,” Darzi said.

The nation’s poor health also has a knock-on effect on the economy, Starmer said, with Britain’s labour market suffering from the 2.8 million people who are economically inactive due to long-term sickness.

Starmer said he wanted to frame the new plan around shifting the NHS from analogue to digital, putting more care in the community, and a focus on preventing people getting sick.

The Conservatives said they agreed investment had to be married with reform but that Starmer missed an opportunity to announce meaningful plans. Health policy chief Victoria Atkins said: “They need to move from rhetoric to action.”