Labour’s health chief has described paying for private healthcare as a “Tory health tax”.
In a statement, Wes Streeting repeated a claim which his party earlier made – that NHS waiting lists would hit 10 million under the Conservatives – something which Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) economist Max Warner said was “highly unlikely” in his May analysis.
The overall NHS waiting list climbed to an estimated 7.57 million treatments at the end of April, affecting 6.33 million patients, according to NHS England figures released on Thursday.
This is up slightly from 7.54 million treatments and 6.29 million patients at the end of March.
It comes after a row over the role of the private sector in the NHS, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth telling Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner during an ITV debate on Thursday that “it pains so many people to see Labour’s Wes Streeting talking so warmly about bringing the private sector into the NHS”.
Mr Streeting said in a statement on Friday: “Rishi Sunak’s claim that the NHS is turning a corner has been blown out of the water. The truth is that waiting lists are 350,000 longer than when he became Prime Minister and they’re on the rise again.
“If the Conservatives are given another five years in charge, waiting lists will hit 10 million, and more and more patients will be forced to pay to go private to get treated on time.
“That’s the choice for patients under the Tories: pain or private? Patients face double taxation on health: they pay their taxes, and then pay the Tory health tax if they want to be treated on time.
“Labour will never leave ordinary people to waiting longer, while there is capacity to treat them. The NHS will buy spare capacity in the private sector and pay for patients to be treated faster, free at the point of use.”
The Labour Party has pledged to introduce 40,000 extra appointments a week at evenings and weekends, double the number of NHS scanners and the “biggest expansion of NHS staff in history”.
The party has also pledged to use “spare capacity in the private sector to get patients seen faster”, with the Government effectively buying care on behalf of patients.
The IFS has looked at Labour’s plans for health and social care in England.
Mr Warner said: “The Labour Party manifesto commits to improving NHS performance substantially, with a focus on eliminating elective waiting times above 18 weeks by the end of the next parliament.
“If achieved, this would represent a major improvement, undoing nearly a decade of worsening in NHS waiting times in just five years.
“The manifesto also promises to deliver the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan and the New Hospitals Programme.
“But delivering on all these promises would be expensive: it would almost certainly require real-terms funding growth upwards of 3% per year.
“Beyond some small amounts of ‘additional’ funding, the Labour manifesto provides no detail about the overall funding the NHS will receive in the next parliament.”
A Conservative Party spokesman said: “Labour has been warned against using these numbers by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies – they’re just scaremongering because they don’t have a plan.
“Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives do, and we’re taking bold action to cut waiting lists at the fastest rate in over a decade outside of the pandemic. We’re recruiting record numbers of doctors and nurses, opening 160 community diagnostic centres, which deliver seven million additional scans, tests, and checks with a pledge to build 50 more.
“Yet in Labour-run Wales, they’ve got the longest NHS waiting lists on record, with one in four people waiting for treatment, and patients waiting nearly seven weeks longer than those in England. It’s a glimpse at what Keir Starmer’s ‘blueprint’ for government looks like – they’d do it in England and put taxes up on working people by £2,094 to fund it.”
During ITV’s seven-way debate on Thursday, Conservative Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt urged her rivals to keep “political dogma out of the public sector and public services” and said: “Most of the public don’t care what colour the cat is, they just want some mice caught.”
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “To be honest, where there is capacity in the private sector, we could be using some of it in order to bring down waiting lists, but let’s not kid ourselves, there is very limited capacity in the private sector and we shouldn’t be using it if it guts more capacity from the NHS.”
Mr ap Iorwerth, the leader of his party, said: “In Wales, we’ve had Labour health ministers who’ve mismanaged health for 25 years. At the heart of the future of the NHS has got to be sustainability – sustainability of funding, which is why I want to see fair funding for Wales – but it’s also got to be the sustainability of the workforce.”
He added: “Two core principles – one, we absolutely have to pledge to keep the NHS free at the point of need, and also to keep privatisation out of the NHS and it pains so many people to see Labour’s Wes Streeting talking so warmly about bringing the private sector into the NHS.”