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Reeves speaks at launch of 10-year NHS plan, defending fiscal rules, and without reference to yesterday's PMQs
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is smiling a lot as she says the plan will get the NHS “back on its feet”.
And she says she has only been able to invest in public services by sticking to her fiscal rules.
She does not refer to what happened in the Commons yesterday at PMQs.
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Streeting praises Reeves, as she speaks at launch of 10-year NHS plan
Streeting says he has to go to the Commons to make a statement to MPs.
But first he introduces Rachel Reeves, saying that she has put an extra £29bn into the NHS.
It is thanks to her leadership that we’ve seen interest rates in our country fall four times. It’s thanks to her leadership that we see wages finally rising faster than the cost of living. And it’s thanks to her leadership we have the fastest growing economy in the G7.
Streeting says NHS staff are “crying out” for reform, contrary to what some people claim.
They are driving innovation on the front line, he says.
He says the government has “scoured the world” to find the best examples of good, modern healthcare.
If Australia can effectively serve communities living in the remote outback, we can meet the needs of people living in rural England.
If community health teams can go door to door to prevent ill health in Brazil, we can do the same in Bradford.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is speaking at the health plan launch.
He says there are “moments in our national story when our choices define who we are”.
He goes on:
In 1948 the Attlee government made a choice founded on fairness, that everyone in our country deserves to receive the care you need, not just the care you can afford.
It enshrined in law, and in the service itself, our collective conviction that healthcare is not a privilege to be bought and sold, but a right to be cherished and protected.
And now, it falls for our generation, to make the same choice to rebuild our national health service to protect in this century.
Here is the Department of Health and Social Care’s news release about the 10-year health plan.
And here are three previous press releases it has put out over the past week trailing bits of the plan.
‘Innovator passports’ set to accelerate cutting-edge NHS care
World-first AI system to warn of NHS patient safety concerns
Healthy food revolution to tackle obesity epidemic
Keir Starmer is about to give a speech launching the government’s 10-year NHS plan.
Aamna Mohdin covers it in her First Edition briefing this morning.
Farage says he would like to have ministers in Reform UK cabinet who weren't MPs or peers
Nigel Farage has said that he would like to appoint ministers to a Reform UK cabinet who weren’t MPs or peers.
In a phone-in with LBC, he said that it was was “nonsense” that ministers “must all be politicians in the House of Commons” and he suggested the UK should follow the example of countries like the US, where members of the government do not have to be members of the legislature.
Farage said:
I really mean this, I do think that you’ve got to think a little bit more about running the public finances as if you’re running a business.
Asked if there were any names he was considering, he declined to say, but added:
I’m amazed by the conversations we’re having already. Some of them are very well-known people.
In the democratic era in Britain it has been conventional for most ministerial jobs, particularly cabinet ones, to be held by MPs, who are accountable to other elected members in the Commons. All governments also need some ministers who is in the House of Lords, and most prime ministers bring in a handful of outsiders by giving them peerages.
But Farage is suggesting having a cabinet with ministers who do not sit in either the Commons or the Lords. In theory this is allowed, and there are some precedents for non-parliamentarians being government ministers (some are set in the appendix to this Constitution Unit report on the ‘outsiders’ being ministers), but it would amount to a huge constitutional change.
In a recent Sunday Times interview, Farage claimed his plan would lead to ministers being more accountable to parliament, not less. Citing the US example, he said:
The point about America is that you can have a senior cabinet position and you are held to account by a committee system that takes place on Capitol Hill and that is the equivalent of being in a court of law. That’s accountability. Standing up in the House of Commons and telling a pack of lies, frankly, is not accountability.
It’s almost impossible for cabinet ministers to be good MPs anyway, because how could they be? What was interesting was Gordon Brown. Digby Jones is a character that I like very much and Brown made Digby business minister and chucked him in the House of Lords.
But there is no evidence that US cabinet ministers are more honest when they face questions in congress than UK ministers are when they are questioned by MPs or peers. Under the ministerial code, lying to parliament is a sacking offence.
Streeting says he wants to expand access to weight-loss drugs on NHS
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said that, under his 10-year plan for the NHS, he wants to extend access to weight-loss drugs.
Speaking on LBC this morning, he said:
Weight-loss jabs are the talk of the House of Commons, half my colleagues are on them and are judging the rest of us saying ‘you lot should be on them’.
And the thing is, if you can afford these weight loss jabs, which can be over £200 a month, well that’s all right for you.
But most people in this country haven’t got spared two and a half grand a year and often the people who have the worst and most challenging obesity also have the lowest income.
So I’m bringing to weight loss jabs the principle of fairness which has underpinned the NHS. It should be available based on need and not the ability to pay.
As PA Media reports, at the moment, people with a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or more, or 30 but with a linked health condition, can be prescribed jabs on the NHS through specialist weight-management services. Other people are paying hundreds of pounds a month to get the jabs privately.
Starmer accepts blame for welfare fiasco and says No 10 ‘didn’t get process right’
Keir Starmer admitted in his BBC interview No 10 “didn’t get the process right” in handling the government’s controversial welfare bill this week, Alexandra Topping reports.
Starmer says reasons for Reeves being tearful at PMQs were 'purely personal' and 'nothing to do with politics'
Keir Starmer has told Virgin Radio that the reasons Rachel Reeves was tearful in the Commons yesterday was “purely personal” and “nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the ups and downs of this week, or her relationship with anybody in the Labour party”.
He said she had a “long chat” with the chancellor last night.
She’s fine … She’s very resilient and strong is Rachel. She’s driven through lots of change in the Labour party. We’ve had to change the Labour party, fought an election together. I’ve seen her resilience first hand. I admire it. She’s a really powerful woman, and she’s also very widely respected.
The sort of messages of concern that have come in over the last 24 hours or so show the great affection and respect in which she is held.
People are held in respect for a reason, and that’s because people know they’re very good at what they’re doing.
He also said it was in the nature of politics that people were “on show the whole time”, even at times of personal difficulty.
We [politicians] are humans in the end and sometimes personal things are obviously on our minds and, in this case, that was the situation ..
There are moments that catch us off guard and if you’re in front of a camera for large periods of your life, unfortunately, that could be caught on camera in a way, if it had been anybody else at work, it would have not really been noticed.
Starmer says he will 'reflect' on welfare bill fiasco, but claims government 'will come through it stronger'
Good morning. Tomorrow it will be a year since the general election, and on Saturday it will be one year from the day when Keir Starmer started forming a government. It has not been a good week to celebrate the anniversary.
In a long interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson last night, only some of which has now been broadcast (the rest is coming later), Starmer defended Rachel Reeves, his chancellor, saying that she would be in office “for a very long time to come” and that an undisclosed personal matter, not politics, was the reason why she was in tears at PMQs yesterday.
As Graeme Wearden reports on his business live blog, UK government borrowing costs are down a bit this morning.
Yesterday they rose after PMQs as bond traders responded to speculation that Reeves might be sacked, and replaced by a chancellor less committed to fiscal discipline.
But that does not mean the political crisis for the government is over. In his BBC interview, Starmer said he needed to “reflect” on what went wrong this week, when the government had to abandon the main thrust of its welfare bill about 90 minutes before MPs were due to vote on it. He said:
I’m not going to pretend the last few days have been easy, they’ve been tough.
I’m the sort of person that then wants to reflect on that, to ask myself what do we need to ensure we don’t get into a situation like that again, and we will go through that process.
But I also know what we will do and that’s we will come through it stronger.
Labour MPs would love to see the government “come through it stronger” but with some tough decisions just postponed, and autumn tax rises all but inevitable, that won’t be easy.
This morning Starmer wants to focus on something else – his 10-year health plan. Here is Denis Campbell’s preview story.
Starmer will be speaking about this at a press conference this morning.
Here is the agenda for the day:
9.30am: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, gives a speech at a Local Government Association conference.
10.30am: Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, announce the 10-year NHS plan at an event in London.
After 11.30am: Streeting is expected to make a statement to MPs about the 10-year NHS plan.
3.45pm: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. (The usual morning one is not happening because of the PM’s event.)
Afternoon: Peers vote on the order banning Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
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