Tag: Wes Streeting

The comments made by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 13 May 2026.

The families in Sussex who have campaigned so tirelessly for this review have shown extraordinary courage. Their commitment to ensuring no other families suffer what they have is admirable, and they deserve the full truth about what happened to them and their babies.

The scope we have set out is deliberately broad and inclusive with all eligible cases included automatically unless families choose otherwise.

Donna Ockenden has already shown, time and again, that she has the expertise and confidence of the families to lead a thorough review, and I have every confidence she will do the same in Sussex.

The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 30 April 2026. We have been unable to acquire a version which hasn’t been redacted.

It’s good to be with you today, and it’s really good to follow a session on high performance.

Let me start by echoing Ian’s words in his opening remarks on Tuesday, when he encouraged you to be ‘loud and proud’ of what you do.

At a time when more and more people have lost faith that things can get better…

When a general sense of pessimism and cynicism risks slipping into fatalism…

And when the very existence of the NHS is being contested like never before…

You are helping to prove the doubters and doomsters wrong.

So I want to say a simple but heartfelt thank you to all of you for all your energy, stamina, creativity, and the huge amount of hard graft over the past year, not just all of you in this room, you and all of your colleagues across the country, because you – the whole team – are achieving something we’ve not seen for a long time, an NHS that is improving.

This government set you ambitious targets last year. And despite resident doctors’ strikes and record demand, you rose to the challenge.

Best 4-hour performance in A&E in 5 years.

Today, almost 4 in 5 patients are seen within 4 hours and 500,000 more people than last year are being seen on time.

Ambulances are arriving faster than for half a decade.

For suspected heart attacks and stroke patients, we’re reaching them five minutes faster than last year, when you and I both know that every second matters.

We have been repeatedly told that the NHS recovery won’t happen, it can’t happen. But you are delivering it.

And in doing so, you have landed one in the eye to every commentator, who was preparing the headline [political content removed], or ‘the NHS falls short’ depending on which of us they dislike most that day.

You’ve delivered a blow to think tank orthodoxy, which says that the NHS will never be able to cut waiting lists, A&E, and ambulance waiting times all at once.

And to those who argue that the results are just a March sprint, just wait until you see April’s performance data.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. And there’s a long track ahead of us. But some of the frontrunners are already approaching the finishing line.

North East and West Midlands ambulance services are within reach of the constitutional standard of 18-minute response times.

At Sheffield children’s A&E, 98% of kids are seen within 4 hours – above the constitutional standard. West Herts, Northumbria, and George Eliot are all above 90%.

George Eliot, in particular, has made incredible strides, going from 66% to 91% in just this past year.

They are showing what’s possible when UEC is made a priority.

The trust introduced round-the-clock assessments to speed up triage; seven-day ward rounds in the Acute Medical Unit to get patients home on time; and doctors working the discharge lounge to make sure patients had the medication they needed to send them home.

Those simple steps have transformed the experience and the safety of their patients. They have proven that we can do it.

Ambulance recovery isn’t happening by accident, if you excuse the pun.

It is happening because the ambulance service is embracing change.

Where paramedics would once provide extraordinary care on the scene, then take their patient to hospital, now they’re using their skills to act as coordinators of care.

Providing the same world class urgent, on-the-spot care they always have, then deciding the best place for follow-up treatment, which isn’t always a hospital.

The result is improved turnaround and handover times, and fewer people ending up in A&E.

You in emergency medicine understand better than most that the NHS is not just a service, it’s a system.

And when part of the system has broken down, people end up at your door.

It’s why A&E had gone from Accident & Emergency to Anything & Everything.

When people can’t see a GP, they end up in A&E, which is worse for them, worse for you, and more expensive for the taxpayer.

When people can’t get the mental health support they need, they reach crisis point, which is worse for them, worse for you, and more expensive for the taxpayer.

And when people can’t get the social or community care they need, they’re left in hospital, which is worse for them, worse for you, and more expensive for the taxpayer.

And so a lot of the answers to cutting ambulance and A&E response times lie outside the doors of the emergency department.

It’s why the health think tanks are so wrong to argue that the government ought to prioritise certain sections of the NHS over others.

That we should focus on social care or emergency care first and do electives or GPs later.

The way we will get the NHS out of the hole it had been left in is by week by week, year on year, across the board improvement. A rising tide that lifts all ships.

The NHS has been the standout winner from this government. Record £26 billion a year investment at a time when the public finances are under big and growing pressures, with increased instability and uncertainty around the world.

It shows what this government’s priority is.

But you and I know that the additional funding alone cannot buy our way to recovery. It has to be accompanied by change and modernisation.

A narrative emerged during the years of [political content removed] that the NHS just needs more inputs into the same model. More staff, more beds, more money in hospitals.

Investment is part of the solution.

But unless we change how the NHS works, those will only be sticking plasters, storing up the same problems for later down the line.

There will still be ever-increasing numbers of patients walking through your doors and ever-increasing numbers stuck in beds waiting to go home.

With the war in Iran and its consequences for the global economy, I’m afraid I can’t play the Oliver Twist of the Cabinet, pleading for more from the Treasury.

Not because the Chancellor is Scrooge – to invoke another Dickens character – but because there isn’t any.

So we’re having to mop up the consequences of austerity, Brexit, [political content removed], the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, as well as dealing with the Iran crisis and making sure that as we do so we’re beating a path to a better future, not just seeking to scramble back to a broken status quo.

So the new investment needs to be matched with change and modernisation to help that investment go further and to make sure we get to where we want to be.

You in emergency medicine are leading the way and showing that change is possible.

Ambulance services are providing more paramedic-led care at the scene.

Urgent community response services in Dorset and Kirklees cared for patients, directed them to appropriate services, with 80% never needing to step foot in a hospital.

Hear and Treat is freeing up ambulance crews to reach the most urgent patients faster, and get other patients the right care, in the right place, at the right time.

We set what was an ambitious 45-minute target for ambulance handovers and today average handover times are down to just shy of 30 minutes.

That’s more patients off ambulances and into EDs more quickly.

And it’s only been possible because of the combined efforts of ambulance services and ED teams – and we are grateful for it.

My department and the NHS worked with RCEM to pull together our model ED guidance.

It identifies the most successful methods of streamlining emergency care from across the country, taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS.

This is the first chapter of the new book we are writing together, and I look forward to working with RCEM on the model discharge guidance, which is coming soon.

The government is putting our money where our mouth is.

We’re investing £300 million in 55 new or improved same day emergency care and urgent treatment centres.

We’re spending almost an extra half a billion pounds on mental health facilities, including up to 85 Mental Health EDs – providing patients with rapid assessment, urgent treatment, and safe discharge with referral for longer term support.

All of this will help to unclog emergency departments, and make sure patients are seen where they should be, when they should be, by who they should be.

Much of the change you are leading is about delivering the left shift from within emergency medicine.

And the government is leading the left shift outside of emergency departments.

Our 10 Year Plan for Health set the NHS on course to become as much a Neighbourhood Health Service as a National Health Service.

A key measure of its success will be A&E admissions – specifically the 1 in 5 patients who turn up to A&E who do not need urgent and emergency care.

They have been failed upstream.

Our modernisation agenda is all about catching patients earlier, treating them faster, and preventing them falling ill in the first place.

That work has already begun.

We’ve recruited 2,000 more GPs and patients can now request appointments online.

We’re delivering millions more dental appointments.

We’ve invested £600 million more in community pharmacy and given them greater powers to monitor and manage patients with ongoing conditions.

We’re investing £4.6 billion in social care.

We’ve legislated for the first ever fair pay agreement for care workers, backed by half a billion pounds.

We’ve given carers the biggest increase in carer’s allowance since the 1970s and increased the disabled facilities grant, which will help to speed up discharge, reduce admissions, and most importantly of all, give people dignity, freedom, quality of life and comfort in their own homes.

And the first report from the Casey Commission is coming later this year, forging the national consensus we need to build a National Care Service.

New neighbourhood health services will bring together healthcare professionals to deliver proactive and personalised care, out of hospital, in the community.

We’ve set them a target of reducing avoidable hospital admissions by 10% for the most vulnerable patients, backed by new financial incentives.

I know that the most difficult cases you see are patients in the midst of a mental health crisis. Failed by a lack of early support, in A&E through desperation, often the very worst place for them to be.

So, we are intervening earlier.

This government promised to recruit 8,500 more mental health workers by the end of the Parliament.

And today I can announce that we have kept that promise… three years early.

We have recruited 8,500 more therapists, psychiatrists, and mental health nurses. They are delivering more care, earlier, and closer to home.

Another 900,000 children can also now see a mental health support team in their own school, thanks to action we have already taken.

Promises made, promises kept.

Change has begun. And the best is still to come.

One of the bigger balancing acts I face as a political leader is giving the public confidence that the NHS is improving and hope for the future, at the same time as acknowledging that we know that things still aren’t good enough.

Corridor care is the most visible, most distressing symptom of the pressures in our NHS.

And since emergency departments are the frontline of the NHS and most people’s first impression of a hospital, you’re in the full glare of the public spotlight – and often used as the barometer for how the service is doing overall.

I know this will be a test the government is judged against.

When we came into office, NHS England didn’t measure corridor care, let alone have a plan to address it.

Corridors were officially referred to as ‘temporary escalation spaces’.

And as corridor care became normalised, you, the teams working in those conditions, suffered the moral injury of having to treat your patients in circumstances so undignified that you wouldn’t wish them on your worst enemy, never mind your closest loved one.

I have walked past many of those trolleys. I cannot imagine walking past lines of trolleys every day, desperately wishing you could do something about it, but being held back.

And I want to thank the Royal College, alongside the Royal College of Nursing and others, for never accepting this practice, for sounding the alarm, and for keeping the pressure on me and others to act.

I am clear: corridor care is not normal, it is not acceptable, it should never be tolerated, and I am determined to end it.

We’re calling it what it is; we’ve defined it; we’re measuring it; and with your help, we’re finally getting on top of it.

Once again, change is being led from below.

Blackpool are using data to predict the busiest periods and clearing beds in advance.

The main corridor [political content removed] was cleared when the Medical Director and Chief Nurse took over discharge decisions.

And take [political content removed], as seen on TV, because when its corridors were full of trolleys this winter, the broadcasters understandably chose the hospital of [political content removed] to exemplify the national crisis.

I was back there the other month, no cameras in sight, apart from the one on my phone, walking the same corridors I did in January, but this time they were empty. Demand hadn’t changed, the level of funding hadn’t changed, but the model of care had.

They put the senior consultant on the front door of the A&E to make swift triaging decisions – sending frail elderly people who needed care, but not A&E, into the frailty same day emergency care centre. And they worked with the Ambulance Service and community teams to get people the right care at home.

As a result, 12-hour waits are down, 10,000 corridor hours were saved in February alone, and the corridors were empty aside from one chap who was about to be wheeled in for a scan.

That is amazing progress, a real credit to the staff of Queen’s, and they are sustaining that progress.

It’s not always easy, but it is important that we recognise improvement and we celebrate success.

I said as much publicly, and then received a text message after an interview on BBC Breakfast, and that message said, ‘Glad to see this can be done. I had the opposite experience with my dad this weekend.’

Her elderly father, who has Parkinson’s, had been left on a bed in a corridor by a vending machine, with a small bleed on the brain, with no water, no buzzer, and no dignity.

That is the contradiction of where the NHS is today.

There has been marked improvement.

Incredible progress has been made against predictions and expectations.

But too many patients are still being failed.

What we have shown together in just under two years that this government has been in office, is that the NHS can change and things can get better.

Success has come when we’ve moved as a pack, working together, driven by a simple but powerful conviction that we will not accept the status quo anymore.

It’s not easy. We are having to rebuild the plane mid-flight. There are times when it is a bumpy ride.

If we’re getting things wrong, I want to hear about it. If something’s not working, we need to know.

But we must never forget that we are one team of 1.5 million people in the National Health Service, working alongside another 1.5 million in social care.

Resident doctors say I need to do more for them. So does general practice. So do consultants. And so does every specialty.

Take Advice & Guidance. If patients should be on waiting lists for elective care, that’s where I want them to be.

But if they can be treated faster and better in the community, that is better for everyone.

Yet even on that simple principle, we have encountered opposition.

We can’t do everything, for everyone, everywhere, all at once. And if everyone just advocates for their part of the service, the NHS is going to end up like an overloaded shopping trolley with the wheels all pointing in different directions.

Every part of the service has been under real pressure and has been through extended crises over the past decade.

It isn’t just your corner of the NHS that feels like that.

The model of care was broken across the whole service.

So, the NHS has to change to survive. And it’s going to take a concerted effort from everyone.

That’s why I wanted to speak to you all today.

You and your colleagues are stepping up. You are proving the pessimists wrong and showing that change is possible. In doing so, you are charting the course to a brighter future.

So, I need you to keep at it.

To keep showing the innovation, drive, and leadership that is taking the NHS from the worst crisis in its history, getting it back on its feet, and making it fit for the future.

We can do it.

All of us.

Together.

And what a legacy that would be for our country.

Thank you very much.

The comments made by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 13 April 2026.

Thanks to this government’s investment and modernisation, the NHS delivered a record number of tests and scans last year. But there’s still a long way to go before we’re catching disease on time.

I was one of the lucky ones – my kidney cancer was caught early, and today I’m living cancer-free. But it shouldn’t be a question of luck. The NHS should be there for all of us when we need it, catching illness earlier so we can treat it faster.

As part of the record investment we are making in the NHS’s recovery, these new CDCs are part of the biggest expansion in NHS diagnostics in a generation – continuing the progress we’re making and helping save lives.

We’re not just investing in more, but delivering differently. The NHS should fit around people’s lives, not require patients to fit their lives around the NHS. Community Diagnostic Centres mean patients can get tests, checks and scans while they’re doing their shopping on the weekend or on the way to pick up the kids from school – without travelling across town to a hospital.

This is part of the extra £26 billion the government is investing in a new, modern NHS that is fit for the future.

The comments made by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, on 13 April 2026.

I want to personally thank all the NHS staff who once again worked round the clock during the BMA’s latest round of strikes to keep the show on the road.

One of the things I am proud of is during previous rounds of resident doctors strikes we’ve maintained 95% of planned care, improvements in A&E and emergency response times. However, I wish we were not putting so much on the shoulders of other NHS staff or spending £300 million on this strike.

That money would have been better spent implementing this offer to improve resident doctors’ pay and career opportunities.

Resident doctors had a 28.9% pay rise in the first weeks of this government. There’s a deal on the table for an average 4.9% pay rise for this year which increases to 7.1% for some of the lowest paid doctors.

We have also prioritised UK graduates for training places and that’s reduced competition for those places from 4 to 1 to less than 2 to 1.

My door is open – as it always has been. I am asking the resident doctors committee to meet me so we can resolve this dispute and put an end to these needless cycles of disruption.

The speech made by Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in the House of Commons on 15 December 2025.

The NHS’s national medical director says:

“This unprecedented wave of super flu is leaving the NHS facing a worst-case scenario”.

This is backed up by the data. On any given day last week, an average of 2,500 patients were in hospital beds—a 55% increase on the week before, and almost double the number from 2023. One hundred and six flu patients are in intensive care, compared with 69 the previous week. There are 1,300 more staff off than in the week before, and the number of calls received by NHS 111 last week was 446,000—8% higher than at this time last year.

It is clear from both the NHS and UK Health Security Agency data that there is a real risk for the NHS and for patients, and it is at this moment of maximum danger that the British Medical Association has chosen to go ahead with Christmas strikes, when they will inflict the greatest level of damage on the NHS.

The BMA said this dispute was about pay, but we gave doctors a 28.9% pay rise. Then it said it was also about jobs, so I offered a deal to halve the competition for jobs to less than two applicants per post. It is now clear what these strikes are really about—the BMA’s fantasy demand for another 26% pay rise on top of the 28.9% doctors have already received. I also offered to extend the BMA strike mandate, so it could postpone this action and go ahead once flu has subsided. The fact that it also rejected that offer shows a shocking disregard for patient safety. Since this strike represents a different magnitude of risk from previous industrial action, I am appealing to ordinary resident doctors to ignore the BMA strike and go to work this week. Abandoning patients in their hour of greatest need goes against everything that a career in medicine is meant to be about.

The entire focus of my Department and the NHS team is now on getting the health service through the double whammy of flu and strikes. We have already vaccinated 17 million people, which is 170,000 more than last year, and 60,000 more NHS staff. We have invested in 500 new ambulances, 40 new same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres, and 15 mental health crisis assessment centres. The NHS will also be recalling resident doctors to work in emergency situations, and we will not tolerate the dangerous attempts to block such requests that we have seen from the BMA in the past.

I am proud of the way that the NHS team has pulled together through strike action in the past, and I know they will move heaven and earth to keep patients as safe as they can this winter. I am just appalled that they are having to do so without the support of their colleagues in the BMA.

Stuart Andrew

This winter, a serious flu wave and rising respiratory syncytial virus infections are pushing the NHS to its limits. Flu admissions, as we have heard, are up 55% in a week, and RSV cases are rising, especially in older people. However, the Government have failed to prepare, as we pointed out earlier in the year.

In July, the Health Secretary accepted Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation advice to expand the RSV vaccine to over-80s, but that expansion seems to have been quietly dropped. Flu vaccine uptake remains dangerously low, with fewer than 30% of some key groups vaccinated. Most worryingly, that includes NHS staff, who are going off sick because of flu, adding to staffing pressures. Delayed discharges are worsening: 19,000 more bed days have been lost this year. Still there is no winter discharge plan, no new funding and no clarity—and today, yes, resident doctors confirmed further strike action this week, which will add pressure to a system already under significant strain. That is why we would ban strike action, but at the same time this Government are literally making it easier for unions through their Employment Rights Bill.

When the NHS is under this level of pressure, families deserve the reassurance that care will be there when they need it, so I ask the Secretary of State: will he now publish the Government’s plan for managing winter pressures, including on delayed discharges and emergency care? Given that he is worried about a double whammy of rising flu cases and a strike, what extra resources is he providing, and if he is not, where is the money coming from? What action will he take to ensure RSV vaccine access for older people, and what will he do to raise flu vaccine uptake in vulnerable groups, particularly in NHS staff? Families are frightened, and some are already grieving. This crisis was not inevitable, but the Government’s failure to prepare has made it much worse.

Wes Streeting

I will ignore the political nonsense about banning strikes and clamping down on trade unions. I will, however, take on directly the charge that we have not prepared for this winter.

We have delivered over 17 million flu vaccinations this season—hundreds of thousands more than this time last year—and 60,000 more NHS staff than last year are also getting their jab. We are on track to deliver the 5 percentage points increase in flu vaccine uptake in healthcare workers, as set out in our urgent and emergency care plan. On children and young people, half a million two to three-year-olds have been vaccinated, which is the same as last year, and 3.6 million school-age children have been vaccinated, which is up 100,000 on last year. We will be going back to schools to do repeat visits in areas where uptake in schools has not been as high as we would like. For care home residents, flu vaccination uptake is 71%. We are on track to meet the RSV vaccination uptake target for 2025-26 in the published urgent and emergency care plan, so we are doing a lot on the vaccination front to prepare.

In fact, on winter planning more generally, we started earlier and did more than ever to prepare for this winter. We had stress-tested winter plans trust by trust. Local NHS leaders ran scenario-based exercises, including managing surges in demand and responding to virus outbreaks to test and strengthen their winter readiness plans, which are now being put into action. We have strengthened access by boosting GP access to keep people well and out of hospital. Through advertising campaigns, new online access routes and more GP practices open for longer hours over the Christmas period, we are making sure more people can be seen closer to home. That matters, because when people can get help early from their GP, they are less likely to end up in A&E.

We are also going further to improve our urgent and emergency care performance this winter. That is set out in our urgent and emergency care plan. We are investing almost £450 million into UEC this winter, meaning: 500 new ambulances on the roads; expanding same-day and urgent treatment centres; providing targeted support to the most challenged trusts; creating capacity and keeping flow moving by sharing weekly data with trusts; encouraging the use of alternative community services; and streamlining in-hospital discharge processes to get patients discharged more quickly from hospital when it is safe to do so, including joining up the NHS and social care, where relationships between health and social care have been improving year on year. If I think about where we are this year compared to last year, there has been sustained improvement. A lot done; more to do.

Of course our job is made harder by strike action. That is why the Government are doing everything we possibly can to get the NHS through this winter. I just wish we were doing it with the BMA, rather than against the BMA.