Budget Resolutions

Apsana Begum Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

This Budget has delivered some welcome measures, including increasing the minimum wage for young adults, lowering energy bills and, of course, lifting the two-child limit. I want to be clear that I voted to add that measure to the Government’s programme—I did not vote against the King’s Speech—and I am proud to be on the right side of history, alongside other colleagues, standing with my constituents to right this wrong in the sixth largest economy in the world.

Governments are judged on how well they can create the conditions to prevent illness and to enable children and adults to live long and healthy lives. Before the last election, the NHS had already suffered years of austerity and starvation of investment, as confirmed by the Darzi report last year. However, the reality is that the overall announcements in the Budget are not on the scale needed. Patients, NHS staff and campaigners are clear that the solutions must involve proper funding for the NHS, including capital investment, and that there need to be mechanisms to raise money to address the catastrophe that the Tories drove us into. Ending outsourcing and privatisation, through a wholesale renegotiation of current PFI debts to reduce future payouts, is one way of addressing the issue of chronic underfunding. The UK already spends far less on health than do many other countries in Europe.

Politics is a matter of priorities and making choices about in whose interests decisions are made. That is why I have grave concerns about the reintroduction of the use of private capital for building NHS neighbourhood health centres, given that past arrangements, such as PFI and PF2, are still damaging the NHS. In fact, all the evidence shows that the involvement of the private sector in the NHS has been disastrous in east London. The trials and tribulations of Barts NHS trust reveal the significant threat of PFIs to NHS budgets, and consequently the ability of trusts to provide the care that NHS patients deserve and that trusts want to provide.

At its core, privatisation is a question of resourcing. The extraction of profits from the system has been shown to undermine capacity and value for money, and to take money away from vital patient services, in other words undermining investment and renewal itself. My constituents do not want to be told that there will be more of the same. They are absolutely and utterly desperate for change. It is crucial that any NHS reform prioritises building back publicly provided NHS services, ends privatisation and does not become PFI 2.0. Big business should not be lining its pockets at the expense of our society’s health and wellbeing. The Government made a manifesto promise that the NHS will always be publicly owned and funded. Taxpayers’ money should be spent only on the service itself, because health should be a question of people not profit.