NHS 10-Year Plan

Richard Tice Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. We want a society where everyone receives high-quality, compassionate care from diagnosis through to end of life. Palliative and end-of-life care services will have a big role to play in our shift out of hospitals and into the community, the emphasis on personalisation for patients and their families, and the joining up between primary and community care services. I would be delighted to hear more from the commission. It is really important that we get this right. Regardless of where people stood on the debate about assisted dying, the one thing that united everyone across the House was a belief that palliative care needs to be so much better than it is today, and that is what we will work on together.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

There is much that unites us in this House about the excellence in this 10-year plan—in particular the fact that the NHS needs reform and that, of course, healthcare should always be free at the point of delivery. But brilliant frontline staff, doctors and nurses say to me that the issue is the bureaucracy and the unnecessary processes and procedures, including in social care. Can the Secretary of State reassure the House that the senior management of the NHS are absolutely determined to reduce the bureaucracy, in particular around technology and the delays caused by GDPR?

[Wes Streeting]

The NHS leadership are absolutely determined to work with us to reduce waste, inefficiency and bureaucracy. We have in Sir Jim Mackey an outstanding chief executive of the NHS, and he and his team are working closely with Ministers to make sure we achieve that goal.

As for the funding model, I just do not know where the Reform party stands from one day of the week to the next. I heard the leader of the hon. Member’s party on the radio this morning doing the dance of the seven veils. He is normally very good at being a straight-talking politician—that is how he likes to present himself—but I cannot follow what the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) thinks about this issue. Does he support a taxpayer-funded universal NHS free at the point of use? [Hon. Members: “No!”] I do not think he does. Does he support the European-style insurance system? I think he probably does—it is the only European thing he has ever supported, by the way. We are in no doubt: the NHS needs reform, but it needs the Reform party like a hole in the head.