Mr Streeting was accused of trying to dodge questions over how he felt about the brutal cuts as he blamed the Conservatives’ handling of the economy.
Wes Streeting was left squirming on Sky News this morning when he was accused of “dodging” a question on the winter fuel payment axe for pensioners.
Kay Burley asked the Health Secretary, who was promoting Labour’s new NHS reform, whether the government “should really be knicking money from pensioners“. Wide-eyed Streeting then replied that the party had to make “really difficult” decisions and blamed the Conservatives.
He said: “The cuts to the winter fuel allowance and the means testing of it will save £1.5 billion.
“Pensioners will still be better off than they were last winter. And they will be better off next winter because we made a political choice to stick to the triple lock.
“We’ve got fairness at the heart of what we are doing. I know its hard, if I think about the sickness in our society, the sickness in the NHS, the sickness in our public finances, the medicine doesn’t always taste good but it is better than the alternative.”
Wes Streeting was in the hot seat on Sky News this morning (Image: Sky News)
Asked by Ms Burley how he felt taking the vote, Mr Streeting blamed the Conservatives’ handling of the economy and denied he was trying to “dodge” the question. Mr Streeting, during the morning media round, warned the NHS could “go bust” if action is not taken to reform it.
Wes Streeting said Britain’s ageing society and “rising costs” could endanger the health service’s future. And he vowed “millions” fewer people would be stuck on NHS waiting lists by the next General Election.
The Prime Minister will set out his plans for reforming the NHS, improving the nation’s health and shifting the focus towards community services after a damning report from Lord Darzi found the NHS is “in serious trouble”.
Sir Keir will warn the NHS must “reform or die”.
And Mr Streeting told BBC Breakfast: “If we don’t grasp both the immediate challenge in front of us and deal with the crisis today, but also prepare the NHS for the challenges of the future in terms of an ageing society and disease and rising costs, rather than a country with an NHS, we’re going to have an NHS with a country attached to it if we’re not careful, and more likely an NHS that goes bust.
“That’s not the future we want to see, which is why we’re going to deal with the immediate crisis today, but get the NHS back on its feet and make it fit for the future.”
Lord Darzi, a widely respected surgeon and former health minister, argues in his report that the NHS can be fixed.
He warned the health of the nation has deteriorated, with more years spent in ill-health.
Factors affecting health, such as poor quality housing, low income and insecure employment, “have moved in the wrong direction over the past 15 years, with the result that the NHS has faced rising demand for healthcare from a society in distress”.
And waiting times targets are being missed across the board, including for surgery, cancer care, A&E and mental health services.
The report says “long waits have become normalised” and “A&E is in an awful state”, with long waits likely to be causing an additional 14,000 more deaths a year, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
By April 2024, about one million people were waiting for mental health services.
The overall NHS waiting list stands at 7.6 million.
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The Health Secretary insisted he was going “hell for leather” to improve the NHS as he promised voters there would be “millions” fewer people on waiting lists by the next election.
Asked about timescales for turning the NHS around, Mr Streeting told BBC Breakfast: “I’m going hell for leather to get the NHS back to what’s known as the constitutional standards, the targets it sets for itself, over the five-year period that we committed to, and to make sure that by the end of this Parliament we see waiting lists millions lower than they are today.
“I hope people have seen that in the last nine weeks that we’ve been in, we have hit the ground running.
“Agreeing a deal the junior doctors are voting on creates the conditions in which staff can focus on getting waiting lists down.”
Primary care and community services, rather than hospitals, will be “the first port of call” for new money for the NHS, Mr Streeting insisted.
He added: “We’ll be setting out our plans in the Budget and the spending review, but effectively it means that when it comes to more resources for the NHS, additional resources going in, the first port of call will be primary care and community services, and social care too, because we’ve got to deal with the systemic problems in our health and care services.”
