Druin Burch
“Leaders take responsibility,” Wes Streeting wrote, in what has already been called his Wesignation letter. The charge against Keir Starmer was that he hadn’t; the boast, gift-wrapped in NHS statistics, was that the outgoing Health Secretary had. “The only question that matters in government is whether we leave our successors a better situation than we inherited.” As he angles for the top job after almost two years running the NHS, what does his record amount to?
Streeting’s no wild success, but no abject failure
Streeting’s letter is heavy with figures. Ambulance response times for heart attacks and strokes have improved, A&E waiting times too, and GP recruitment is up. Waiting lists have fallen, which was a key target, and, most importantly, overall productivity is up: by 2.8 per cent against a goal of 2 per cent. Streeting says this is down to the hard work of others, with the implication, naturally, that the credit is his.
The fall in waiting-list figures is real enough to be politically useful, but dubious enough to leave it unclear whether patients have been treated or merely subtracted. NHS England (which still exists, but is shuffling itself toward abolition) doesn’t give a breakdown of reasons why patients come off the list. Published data doesn’t distinguish between patients having been treated and patients removed from the list after administrative ‘validation’ exercises. Even if the NHS is doing better – which isn’t quite the same as doing more – we don’t know if it’s a temporary response to specific temporary funding.
