Sunday shows round-up: Wes Streeting says the NHS is ‘addicted to overspending’

This week, Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced their plan to abolish NHS England, which Starmer has said will ‘cut bureaucracy’ and bring management of the NHS ‘back into democratic control’. Today on Sky News, Streeting told Trevor Phillips that the size of NHS England had doubled since 2010, when the NHS had ‘the highest patient satisfaction ever’.

Streeting claimed that his restructuring would save hundreds of millions of pounds, and create a ‘smaller, leaner, more efficient head office’. Labour will also make big job culls elsewhere in the NHS, and Phillips asked Streeting whether it was right that the NHS’s 42 integrated care boards were being asked to cut their running costs by half. Streeting said that previous financial plans for the year had projected an overspend of £5 billion, and that the NHS has been ‘addicted to running up routine deficits.’

Streeting: There is an ‘over-diagnosis’ of mental health problems

Labour will also make cuts to disability benefits as part of their efforts to reduce the welfare bill.