Delivering a speech on government efficiency in Hull, northern England, Starmer said it was hard to explain to the British people why such a huge portion of state spending was funneled into “two layers of bureaucracy.” Politicians of all stripes — including from his own Labour Party — had been guilty over the years of outsourcing decisions to reviews, consultations and agencies, he added.
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“That money could and should be spent on nurses, doctors operations, GP appointments,” Starmer said on Thursday. Scrapping NHS England — set up in the early 2010s by the Conservatives — “will put the NHS back at the heart of government where it belongs, freeing it to focus on patients, less bureaucracy, with more money for nurses: An NHS refocused to cutting waiting times at your hospital,” he said.
The decision is a statement of intent for Labour, which founded Britain’s National Health Service in the aftermath of World War II. British voters consistently say they trust Labour more than any other party on health care.
Cutting NHS waiting lists was one of Starmer’s key pledges in last year’s general election, and his government is also seeking to revive Britain’s flagging economy through moves to boost productivity, including by slashing red tape and paring down the UK’s alphabet soup of agencies and other arms-length bodies.
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Historically, “there’s a knee-jerk response to difficult questions, to difficult lobbies, and the response goes like this: Let’s create an agency, start a consultation, make it statutory, have a review, until slowly, almost by stealth, democratic accountability is swept under a regulatory carpet,” Starmer said.
“Politicians almost not trusting themselves, outsourcing everything to different bodies because things have happened along the way, to a point where you can’t get things done,” he added.
