Winter 2025: Health and Social Care Secretary's statement
Source: gov.uk (2025-01-15)

The Health and Social Care Secretary made a statement to the House of Commons on winter pressures.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

With permission, I’d like to make a statement on winter pressures.

Can I start by saying that my thoughts, and I am sure the thoughts of the whole House, will be with the nurse who was stabbed in a horrific attack at Royal Oldham Hospital on Saturday.

Nurses are the backbone of our NHS. They should be able to care for their patients without fear of abuse or violence.

As she goes through treatment for her injuries, we pray for her speedy recovery, her full recovery and that she be left to recover in peace.

I want to start by thanking our NHS and social care staff for their remarkable effort, stamina and care in the most challenging of circumstances over the past few weeks.

I have seen, first hand, staff doing their level best in hospitals and care homes across our country in the South West, in Essex, in London, in South Yorkshire and the North West.

Even when patients are left waiting far longer than they should be in conditions they should never be made to endure, they are still at pains to stress that the staff are doing their best.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I said on day one in this job that I would never gloss over problems in the health service.

I will not pretend that everything is going well when it is not.

The experience of patients this winter is unacceptable.

I visited one A&E department over Christmas where I was told on the way in that I was lucky as I had come on a quiet day.

Yet as I walked through the hospital, I saw patients on trolleys lining the corridors where they were being treated without the dignity or safety they should expect as a minimum.

I saw frail, elderly people on beds in the emergency department, many with dementia, crying out in pain and confusion because ultimately they were in the wrong place for their care needs.

This was supposedly a good day. The King’s Fund has said that the NHS is facing a toxic cocktail of pressures this winter and they are right.

Fourteen years of under-investment and a lack of effective reform has combined with a tidal wave of rising pressures.

This has been the busiest year on record for our ambulance and accident and emergency services.

We have had severe cold snaps with temperatures as low as minus 15 in some parts of England.

Five thousand one hundred patients are in hospital beds with flu, more than 3 times this point last year, alongside the impact on patients.

The rise in respiratory infections saw 53,000 NHS staff forced off work sick in the first week of this year.

The result has been patients let down by ambulances that don’t arrive on time, A&E departments that leave them waiting 12 hours or more and the continued normalisation of corridor care.

This is not the level of care staff want for their patients, and it is not the level of care this government will ever accept for patients.

I said coming into this winter that 14 years of failure can’t be turned around in 6 months.

It will take time to fix our broken NHS.

Since July, we’ve done everything we can to prepare the NHS for winter.

[Political content redacted] I called the BMA on day one, met them in week one and within 3 weeks negotiated a deal to end the junior doctors strike with a new deal for resident doctors.

For the first winter in 3 years, staff are on the front line, not the picket line.

The Chancellor made immediate investment in the NHS in-year, to fill the black hole we inherited and prevent us having to cut back on services.

We’ve introduced the RSV vaccine with more than a million people protected against the virus and counting.

In total, 29 million vaccines have been delivered for flu, COVID-19 and RSV, with more patients protected against flu than at this stage last winter.

If anyone is yet to get themselves vaccinated, it is not too late for them to protect themselves, their family and the NHS.

Check if you are eligible and book through your local GP or pharmacy.

Madam Deputy Speaker, we are working hand in hand with NHS England and care leaders and I continue to meet regularly with senior leaders in social care, NHS England and the UK Health Security Agency.

We have an excellent national operations centre that is running 7 days a week.

Its data allows us to zoom in not just on individual hospitals, but on individual patient waiting times, respond in real time to spikes in pressures and manage threats as they emerge.

The NHS is now using critical incidents proactively to focus minds and get the system responding to de-escalate and steer them back to safer waters.

And Madam Deputy Speaker, I am happy to report there is currently one live critical incident, down from 24 last week.

But I do not pretend that this is good enough.

It will take time to get back to the standards that patients deserve, but it can be done.

It will require a big shift in the focus of healthcare, out of the hospital and into the community, to free up beds for emergency patients, and to prevent people having to call an ambulance or go to A&E in the first place.

That is the reform agenda this government is enacting.

In recent weeks, we have announced steps to begin rebuilding general practice and immediate and long-term action in social care.

On coming into office, we inherited a situation where qualified GPs could not get a job while patients could not get a GP.

That’s why within weeks, I found just shy of £100 million to recruit 1,000 more GPs by April.

We’ve recruited hundreds of GPs to the front line already and will recruit hundreds more in the months to come.

We’ve announced an extra £889 million in funding for general practice, the biggest funding uplift in years, alongside a package of reforms to bust bureaucracy, slash unnecessary targets and give GPs more time to spend with their patients, our first step to bringing back the family doctor.

Ten days ago, I visited a care home in Carlisle that was offering intermediate step-down care for NHS hospitals.

They were able to give patients en suite bathroom facilities with rehab in care homes, all at half the price it was costing the taxpayer to keep patients in a hospital bed up the road.

Better for patients and less expensive for taxpayers.

Yet there are 12,000 patients in hospital beds today who don’t need to be there, but can’t be discharged because appropriate care isn’t available.

That is why the government is making up to £3.7 billion of extra funding available for local authorities who provide social care.

That is why we are delivering an extra 7,800 home adaptations through the Disabled Facilities Grant this year and next year.

That is why we have delivered the biggest increase in Carer’s Allowance since the 1970s, worth an extra £2,300 to family carers.

That is why we are introducing fair pay agreements to tackle the 131,000 vacancies in social care, and that is why we have appointed Baroness Louise Casey to help build a national consensus on the long-term solutions for social care too.

Madam Deputy Speaker, from visiting emergency departments, from monitoring the performance of the NHS over this winter and noting the variation in performance across the country, it is also clear that we can get our ambulance and A&E services working better.

So, before the spring, we will be setting out the lessons learned from this winter and the improvements we’ll be putting in place ahead of next winter.

Finally, let me address the issue of corridor care, [political content redacted].

I want to be clear, I will never accept or tolerate patients being treated in corridors.

It is unsafe, undignified, [political content redacted] and I am determined to consign it to the history books.

I cannot and will not promise that there will not be patients treated in corridors next year. It will take time to undo the damage that has been done to our NHS.

But that is the ambition this government has.

Annual winter pressures should not automatically lead to an annual winter crisis.

[Political content redacted]

That is why this government is investing an extra £26 billion in our health and care services and undertaking the fundamental reform both services need.

It will take time, but we will deliver an NHS and a national care service that provide people with the care they need, where they need it and when they need it.

I commend this statement to the House.