Health Bill

Sonia Kumar Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sonia Kumar (Dudley) (Lab)]

Today, we stand at a defining moment for our healthcare system. We face a ballooning NHS budget and a social care system in crisis. We ask ourselves what must change to reduce deep-rooted health inequalities, improve patient-centred care and remain financially sustainable. The NHS was designed to treat acute illness and provide healthcare free at the point of use, regardless of income, background or status. Medical and scientific progress has transformed healthcare—people are living longer than ever before, often managing multiple, long-term conditions that once would have been fatal.

The NHS was founded on the simple but powerful principle of equity, yet health outcomes remain profoundly unequal. Research consistently shows that where someone is born and the socioeconomic conditions they grow up in can determine how long they live, sometimes by more than a decade. The wider determinants of health—income, housing, education and employment—shape outcomes long before illness appears. Now we must embrace the global technological revolution; from artificial intelligence to robotics, we must harness it to improve patient-centred care. Used well, technology does not replace humanity in medicine, but restores it, giving clinicians more time to care.

Indeed, we should go further. AI and data analytics should be used not only to treat individuals, but to understand communities, designing healthcare around the real conditions in which people live. A true systemic approach means not just knowing that a patient has a condition such as high blood pressure, but understanding why: the environment that shapes us, rates of poverty or unemployment, housing conditions, education levels, access to green spaces, the density of fast food outlets or accessibility of affordable healthcare services per capita. The reality is that health inequalities are complex, interconnected and predictable. We require a whole-system approach, bringing together the NHS, local councils, hospitals, charities and grassroots organisations.

Having a way to fully map communities and what they look like would allow for tailor-made healthcare services to be delivered to the population. Healthcare and the NHS do not need reform; they need an ecosystem map. I want to call it the health biosystem. It would be a system where health is shaped not in hospitals, but in homes, schools, streets and workplaces. As Attlee once said, we have

“not been elected to try to patch up an old system but to make something new”.