2025 started badly for the Labour government’s promises to address the crisis in the National Health Service. Health minister Wes Streeting was forced to concede that he felt ‘distressed and ashamed’ of what patients were going through as 20 NHS Trusts declared critical incidents in January. Driven by high winter virus rates and appalling weather conditions, hospitals across the country, already at breaking point, were overwhelmed, with horror stories of patients waiting hours in ambulances or being treated on trolleys in corridors with wards at almost 100% occupancy. But this crisis was a case of the chickens coming home to roost, the result of decades of underfunding and understaffing in the NHS – under Labour and Conservative governments alike – that have devastated health care for the working class. Labour’s proposed ‘transformation’ of the NHS will only exacerbate matters.
In early January, people in A&E at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital were facing waits of up to 50 hours. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine confirmed that patients were ‘receiving unacceptable, undignified and unsafe care in corridors and in the back of ambulances’. But this merely reflected a crisis already exposed in December 2024 by a Royal College of Nursing report, On the Frontline of the UK’s Corridor Care Crisis, in which more than 5,000 nurses working in hospitals across Britain detailed their experience of being forced to care for sick people in ‘corridors, storerooms, carparks… and even toilets’, with no access to emergency equipment such as oxygen and monitoring facilities. Nurses described women being forced to undergo miscarriages in corridors and people dying in chairs because medical staff could not adequately deliver urgent care. Some spoke of being responsible for the care of 30 or 40 ‘trolley bed’ patients at any one time.
There is a lack of space – partly fuelled by the disastrous state of social care, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in hospital beds because they cannot be safely discharged – but also, acutely, a crisis of understaffing. There are 31,000 unfilled nursing posts in the NHS in England and an overall NHS vacancy rate of 8.4% or 121,000 full time equivalent roles – and 9.9% or 152,000 roles vacant in social care. Successful applications to nursing have dropped, in some places up to 40%. The government’s ten-year plan to transform the NHS includes a commitment to increase nursing numbers from 350,000 to 550,000 by 2036-37. But RCN predictions are that only 1,000 more nursing students will start in 2029 compared to ten years earlier.
The latest Referral to Treatment figures show waiting lists at 7.48 million cases, representing 6.28 million people waiting for treatment. Over three million of them have been waiting for over 18 weeks, 222,000 for more than a year. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced the target to get 65% of people treated electively within 18 weeks by March 2026. But NHS England says the £22bn promised is not enough to fund Labour’s plans. The relationship between the agency and the Department of Health has been described as ‘toxic’. What the plans, outlined by Starmer as part of the Labour government’s Plan for Change, signal in reality is an expanded role for the private sector, which is already responsible for over 100,000 elective appointments and procedures per week for the NHS, up more than half in the last four years. The private sector says it can provide an additional one million appointments per year for the NHS. But when it comes to procedures, private hospitals often don’t have intensive care units, and just take on straightforward cases, with about 6,000 people being transferred every year back into NHS facilities due to medical complications.
So the new plans have little to do with alleviating pressure on the health service and everything to do with increasing profits for private health providers. As Starmer himself said: ‘When the waiting lists have ballooned to 7.5 million, we will not let ideology or old ways of doing things stand in the way of getting people’s lives back on track.’ Streeting added: ‘I’m not going to allow working people to wait longer than is necessary, when we can get them treated sooner in a private hospital, paid for by the NHS.’ This is a continuation of the handover of public funds to private companies exemplified by the PFI agreements championed by the Labour Party when it was last in government. Meanwhile, health care for the most vulnerable will see its funding slashed. The duty on the NHS to fund the roll-out of women’s health hubs across the country is to be removed, as is a plan to ensure annual health checks for people with learning difficulties. The working class is being thrown under the bus as spending in real terms is cut and private profits are assured.
Hannah Caller
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
