Why has Labour dropped so many NHS targets?

Does the Labour government still care about mental health? Recently, it dropped its NHS targets for mental health, along with other targets on dementia diagnoses and women’s health. Today at Health questions in the Commons, ministers were confronted about whether they were still committed to improving treatment for mental illness, given the targets are now gone. Stephen Kinnock argued: 

‘What we know about targets is that if you try and overload a system with too many targets, it causes confusion, and you end up with, as she rightly says, perverse outcomes. And so we are very clear that we want to not have a system which is based on just making policy by press release, as was the case under the previous government, putting out press announcements, loads of them, for more targets. It all makes for nice front page headlines, but it doesn’t actually lead to any serious delivery of the strategy that we need to deliver….