Streeting urges BMA to ‘stop sabre-rattling’ and work with him to fix NHS

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has urged doctors’ union leaders to work with the government on its plans to change the NHS and to “stop sabre-rattling” on industrial action over pay.

Streeting said a damning report on Thursday by the peer Ara Darzi made it clear that the “status quo of managed decline is not an option, nor is simply pouring ever increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money into a broken model”.

He told the British Medical Association (BMA) general practice committee that backing collective action over budget restraints would harm patients.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Streeting said the threat of collective action “would harm patients and put more burden on their colleagues in other parts of the NHS”. He added: “I think GPs want to work with this government. They can see the seriousness of our intent … they want, as we do, to rebuild the family doctor relationship. I urge the BMA to work with us on that, and stop the sabre-rattling.”

Earlier John Bell, a professor of medicine at Oxford University, said the BMA had “been a major drag on reform of healthcare”. He said: “If you’re thinking about eggs you’re going to have to break, I’m afraid that the stranglehold that the medical profession is broadly to have on the way we run a healthcare system is going to have to be sorted.

“I think that the medical profession is locked into a way of life and a way of practising medicine, but they are deeply conservative, and they’re very hard to move to a different place.”

Asked about those comments, Streeting said: “I do not find resistance in the NHS. People are crying out for change, and I have some good conversations with the BMA on reform. And I think there’s a real possibility, having settled the junior doctors’ dispute, to rebuild that sense of professional partnership.”

But he added: “Despite the fact we put £100m into GP unemployment in the first six weeks of this government and our determination to grow primary care in general practice as a proportion of NHS budgets, we still see sabre-rattling – the unnecessary threat of collective action.”

Streeting said “the NHS will go bust if we fail to flatten the curve of cost and demand in the longer term”. But he ruled out sugar and salt taxes to pay for upgrades. Speaking to LBC he said: “That wasn’t in our manifesto. And the reason why we’re reluctant to go down that that sort of route is because there is a cost of living crisis at the moment. Crucially, on public health and prevention measures. We’ve got to take people with us.”

Asked about timescales for turning the NHS around, Streeting told BBC Breakfast: “I’m going hell for leather to get the NHS back to what’s known as the constitutional standards, the targets it sets for itself, over the five-year period that we committed to, and to make sure that by the end of this parliament we see waiting lists millions lower than they are today.”

Speaking to Times Radio he said: “I think people know that it’s taken more than a decade to break the NHS and it’s going to take time to get the NHS back on its feet, and to make sure it’s fit for the future. Because we don’t invest in the capital and the tech, day-to-day spending balloons out of control, and then capital and tech budgets are raided to plug the gaps in day-to-day spending, and so the cycle repeats.

“In the spending review, the chancellor and I are determined to break that cycle by really focusing on the capital investment and the tech investment that will help us to bring down ballooning costs on the day-to-day spending and improve the productivity of the system.”