NHS: Winter Preparedness

James Naish Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

This Labour Government are investing more in the NHS—£26 billion, rising to £29 billion over the spending review period. Urgent and emergency care is improving. Ambulance response times are improving year on year. I recognise that there are particular challenges with the West Midlands ambulance service. We are going as hard and fast as we can to repair the damage done by 14 years of Conservative Government. We are able to do that only because people chose to vote Labour at the last general election.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

At a Hanukkah event in Nottingham last night, I spoke to a medical undergraduate who welcomes the Government’s commitment to halving competition, and the offer that was put to the BMA. Lots of medical professionals, be they hospital doctors, GPs or allied health professionals, are struggling to find work. Will the Secretary of State outline how this offer, and the Government’s other work, would have helped those individuals?

[Wes Streeting]

This is the futility of the BMA’s position. The steps that we were proposing to take—both increasing the number of specialty places and bringing forward emergency legislation to deal with UK prioritisation—would have reduced the competition ratio from around 4:1 today to less than 2:1. That would have kicked in during the current round. We would have been able to bring forward emergency legislation and a new application round in the spring. The BMA has rejected that approach, and we will not proceed on that basis.

It is for the BMA to explain what its dispute is all about. We were told that it was all about jobs. What it seems to be about in substance is that the BMA wants a 26% pay rise, in addition to a 28.9% pay rise. I think the BMA is missing a degree of perspective about not just the state of the public finances but the pressures on other parts of the NHS and the public sector. The Government are committed to improving, consistently and year on year, the pay, terms and conditions of staff, and, crucially, the conditions in which patients are seen and treated. We cannot fix it all at once.

In fact, when this and previous Governments have floated the idea of raising extra money, BMA committees have sometimes been among the first to complain about the prospect of higher taxes, including on pensions, and other issues. It seems that their view is that everybody else should pay higher taxes for their higher salaries, and no one else matters. For me, those Agenda for Change staff who have been left behind are the first priority.