Keir Starmer has said the NHS is “broken” and he believes the future of the health service is in jeopardy under the Conservatives.
The Labour leader accused the Tories of presiding over a “cycle of decline” as new research by his party shows that nearly a fifth of patients in England, which equates to 4.5 million people, went to A&E last year because they were unable to get a GP appointment.
He also said Rishi Sunak was “sitting on his hands” with the impending threat of further industrial action from junior doctors and nurses in their dispute with the government.
Starmer said he saw “no political advantage” from the strikes and was fearful about the risks to patient safety from more walkouts in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. On Monday, it emerged that at least 196,000 procedures and hospital appointments in England had to be rescheduled due to the four-day junior doctors strike last week.
He said: “I think the NHS is broken. There’s been one way of doing things for the last 13 years, and this is where we’ve ended up now with the NHS.
“If they carry on like this, it can’t survive – the biggest risk to the NHS is another Tory government.”
Labour said its research on A&E data showed the “collapse of general practice” and poor use of taxpayers’ money with emergency hospital visits costing the NHS up to nine times as much as a GP appointment.
The findings are based on polling of 1,500 adults carried out by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, which found that 18% of patients attending A&E did so because they could not get a GP appointment in time.
Starmer, the MP for the London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, believes a sustainable future blueprint for the NHS is neighbourhood health services tailored to local communities instead of a centralised system.
On Friday Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, will outline plans to reform GP services through local health services. Separate research by Labour found that one person who called 999 for an ambulance was forced to wait for an hour-and-a-half before their call was answered.
Labour sent freedom of information requests to all 10 ambulance trusts in England to find out the longest ambulance response time in December. The longest 999 response in December was in Yorkshire, where a caller waited for an hour and 37 minutes.
The party also asked for the longest 111 response time in December, which was three hours and five minutes for a caller in the Midlands.
Streeting said: “After 13 years of Conservative mismanagement of the NHS, patients can no longer be sure their 999 call will be answered or that an ambulance will arrive when they need one.
“People are just praying they don’t fall ill or suffer an accident. Labour will launch the biggest expansion of NHS staff training in history, paid for by abolishing non-doms, so that the NHS is there for us when we need it once again.”
