Keir Starmer today confirmed he has never used private healthcare as he warned the NHS must reform or “die”.
Labour ’s leader gave a one-word “no” when asked if he’d used it “ever at all” by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday.
It stands in contrast to Rishi Sunak, who last week admitted he had used private healthcare, but said he is now registered with an NHS GP.
But it comes as Mr Starmer takes on the doctors’ union with a defiant blast at “bureaucratic nonsense” and “inefficiencies” in the health service.
Labour’s leader today insisted keeping the NHS free at the point of use is “absolutely fundamental for me”, but could allow more private firms’ involvement after scrapping his anti-outsourcing pledge.
“Well-meaning reverence for the ideals it represents and the care it can deliver has supplanted reality,” he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.
“And that reality is simple: if we don't get real about reform, the NHS will die.”
The Labour leader backed Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s reforms to make GPs salaried NHS employees - and allow patients to bypass them, referring themselves to specialists.
“We need to be ruthless with the bureaucratic nonsense you encounter every day in the health service,” he wrote.
“Why can't people with persistent back problems self-refer to physio?
“Why if you notice bleeding do you have to get a GP appointment, simply to get the tests that you then do yourself at home?
“Every patient will have their own experience of these mundane inconveniences and inefficiencies.
“Across the system and across the country each one adds up, resulting in a mind-boggling waste of time, energy and money, all of which could be better spent.”
The pledges have echoes of New Labour's 1997 promises, when Sir Tony Blair swept into power on the back of a manifesto vowing to slash NHS waiting times and make the service more patient-focused.
Labour’s leader used his article to outline a series of reforms that a future Labour government would introduce.
Critics say allowing people to self-refer to specialists would clog up lengthy waiting lists and send some people to the wrong care.
But Mr Starmer told the BBC: “The reason I want to reform the health service is because I want to preserve it. I think if we don’t reform the health service we will be in managed decline.”
He said it was time to accept that the system needed overhauling, with the pressure on GP surgeries causing more people to resort to attending hospital instead.
He suggested young doctors were not keen on taking on the "burdens and liabilities" of the current system as older GPs leave the workforce.
"As GPs retire and those contracts are handed back, I want to phase in a new system that sees GPs fairly rewarded within the NHS, working much more closely with other parts of the system," he said.
"Not everyone will want to hear this - but it is the direction we need to go in."
