Outgoing Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting boasts of achieving ‘ambitious targets’ during his time in office, so let’s recap:
- Healthy life expectancy is now below the state pension age in over 90% of local areas in Britain, with a 20-year difference between the richest and poorest communities. Maternal mortality is at its highest for almost 20 years.
- There is a real-term NHS funding deficit of £423bn; the repair bill across the NHS estates has risen to £16bn.
- Streeting has proposed a reintroduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). The original PFI schemes have left the NHS with £44bn debt, with repayments approximately six times the original investment.
- Britain lost its measles elimination status in 2026, and it was Streeting’s decision in 2025 to remove a WHO-recommended target for 95% of children to be vaccinated against infectious diseases.
- Streeting has encouraged the contracts with US data analytics firm Palantir, which is deeply embedded in the US military and central to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Streeting prides himself on achieving the biggest monthly drop in waiting lists since 2008, quoting a fall of 110,000 in March 2026. John Lister, of Keep Our NHS Public, has shown that upwards of 100,000 of these were patients removed from the list for administrative reasons rather than after being treated.
Under Streeting, outsourcing to the private sector has increased with evidence of longer waiting times for NHS patients. Streeting claimed that A&E waiting times were the best in five years when on every measure, A&E performance is worse than pre-pandemic. Between April 2021 and April 2025, time spent on a trolley in A&E after a decision to admit to a ward, was 90 times longer – associated with an appalling rise in avoidable deaths. Meanwhile, Streeting has received £400,000 from private healthcare interests.
Cheers, Wesley!
