Wes Streeting criticises Labour colleagues who blame Whitehall for blocking reform – UK politics live | Politics
Key events
Q: Why are you doing so badly in Wales?
Davey says the Lib Dems won a seat again in Wales at the last election. And he says he thinks they will improve their representation in the Senedd at the elections this year. He won’t go beyond that, he says. He says, with Plaid Cymru, Wales has real multi-party politics.
Davey says, as opponent of assisted dying bill, he thinks it is ‘outrageous’ that Lords trying to block it
Asked about assisted dying, Davey says he voted against the bill. But he goes on:
I personally voted against the assisted dying bill. And, though many of my colleagues didn’t, I think the real issue at the moment is what the Lords is doing, and I think it’s quite outrageous that that seems to be members of the House of Lords who are trying to kill the bill. And I say that as an opponent of the bill. But it’s the democratic right of the House of Commons to pass bad law if it wants to.
Q: Before the election you said the problem with the NHS was Tory incompetence. Now you say it is Labour incompetence. Do you have a view as to what the underlying problem is?
Davey says he is clear that the Tories are most to claim for the NHS crisis.
But he says Labour has not been able to sort the problem out.
He says the Lib Dem argument that is that social care must be transformed at the same time. That is what experts think, he says. And sorting out care would transformative.
He says he set out this argument in his book last year, Why I Care.
The Guardian wrote an editorial about this at the time.
Q: What is your approach to Labour? And, with all the challenges facing the Lib Dems this year, are you the person to carry on leading them?
Davey says Labour have been a disappointment. And he says they are the party with a leadership problem; there are Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be leader. But Streeting needs to sort out the trolley wait problem first, he says.
Referring to the Lib Dems, he says the YouGov poll today shows that are five parties within 10 points of each other.
But the Lib Dems are doing well in actual elections, he says.
He says in May last year the Lib Dems beat Labour and the Conservatives for the first time.
Davey says Labour have been ‘total failure’ on social care
Davey says he had hoped that Keir Starmer was serious about what he said during the election campaign about wanting a cross-party solution to social care. He goes on:
I’m afraid I’ve been proved wrong. There has been total failure on social care, kicking it into the long grass. No real political push for it. Elongated timetables. So they’ve been huge, disappointing.
And they will not save our NHS unless they sort out care. I’ve long said if you if you care about the NHS, you’ve got to care about care.
On Iran, Davey says he would take Donald Trump’s comments about stopping the murder of protesters more seriously if he were also willing to stop things like that happening in Minnesota.
But he says he supports Trump in wanting to use sanctions to put pressure on Iran.
Q: What you are proposing would cost less than 1% of the NHS budget. Is this really about changing the NHS, or is it really about campaigning ahead of the local elections?
Davey says this is about responding to “the pain and distress that people are feeling in every hospital A&E across the country”, and showing that there is a political party that wants to do something about it.
Responding to the claim that £1.5bn is not a big enough sum, he says this shows that the plan is affordable.
And he rejects the suggestion he is parking Lib Dems tanks on Labour’s lawn. The NHS was a liberal creation, he says, citing William Beveridge.
Davey urges journalist at the press conference to visit hospitals themselves and examine what is happening in A&E.
It is really quite astonishing. It’s never happened before in my lifetime. And it’s the untold crisis in the health service.
Davey defends Liberal Democrats’ continuing use of X, saying there should be ‘strong liberal voice’ on social media
Q: Why are the Liberal Democrats still using X?
Davey says he is not afraid to pick a fight with Elon Musk. He says Musk has interfered in British democracy “in the most outrageous way”. Musk has also incited violence, he says.
And he says what has been happening with Grok has been “shocking”.
But he says there should be a “strong liberal voice” on social media.
UPDATE: Davey said:
I’ve picked a few fights with Elon Musk because I think he has interfered in British democracy in the most outrageous way. He’s incited violence and I have called in the past for investigations into him.
The point about Grok – which is quite shocking – and what it is doing, and the danger that it poses to women in the UK, to our children, is quite shocking. We need to take it really seriously.
We have been thinking about it really hard. There’s a real balance to strike here. I think X does need a strong Liberal voice and I’m leader of the Liberal Democrats to give that voice.
When it was put to him that, without the US pharmaceutical deal agreed before Christmas, companies would no longer invest in life-saving treatments, Davey said he did not accept that. He said that the claims from the Trump administration were wrong, and that the UK government was being “weak”.
At his press conference Ed Davey is now taking questions.
Asked if just getting rid of 12-hour waits was not very ambitious, Davey said over time he would like to go further. He would like to get back to the era when no one had to wait more than four hours.
He also claimed the Lib Dems were the only party talking about this.
UK medical graduates to be prioritised for training places under new bill
In his speech Davey also criticised Labour over the lack of jobs availabe for doctors after they train.
The Department of Health and Social Care has announced a plan to help with this problem today. PA Media reports:
Medical graduates from the UK and Ireland will be prioritised for training places under new legislation to be proposed by the government.
The move forms part of the health secretary’s aim of resolving the dispute between the government and resident doctors in England.
Wes Streeting said that while the NHS “will never exclude international talent” he wants to give “home-grown medics” the “level playing field they deserve”.
He met representatives from the British Medical Association (BMA) last week with a view to ending strike action by doctors.
The medical training (prioritisation) bill will be introduced to parliament today.
The proposed legislation will prioritise doctors from the UK and Ireland, and those who have worked in the NHS for a significant period, for specialty training places.
Specialty training is the final stage of becoming a fully qualified doctor, with a focus on a specialist area of medicine or general practice.
Graduates from the UK and Ireland would also be prioritised for foundation training under the bill.
Since 2019, the number of applicants for training posts has risen from 12,000 to almost 40,000, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
In his speech this morning Ed Davey criticised the record of the other main parties on the NHS. He is particularly harsh about Reform UK and Nigel Farage, the Reform leader.
[Farage] still hasn’t mentioned it once in the House of Commons, although he’s not actually there often, so that might be why. But he hasn’t said the word hospitals once.
But we know what he wants to do, don’t we? We know what his plan is, even if he’s now too smart to say it out loud. He wants to privatise the NHS, replace it with an American style insurance system, a system where every year in the US, almost half a million people go bankrupt because of their medical bills. That is Trump’s America. Don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.
Ed Davey sets out Lib Dem plan which he says could end 12-hour A&E trolley waits in England by end of year
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has set out a plan to end 12-hour A&E waits in English hospital. The party says the problem has escalated hugely over the past few years, and it is proposing two measures that it says would address the problem.
They are:
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“Spending £1.5bn to make around 6,000 more beds available each day by expanding hospital capacity and creating ‘safety net’ social care beds for patients waiting on long-term care decisions.” The Lib Dems would get the money by “cancelling the planned medicine price hike agreed with the Trump administration before Christmas”.
Speaking at a news conference this morning, Davey said:
Right now, in the corridors of A&E departments across our country, there are thousands of people – sick or injured – lying on trolleys or waiting on plastic chairs. No privacy. No dignity. There have even been tragic cases of people dying on those trolleys and left undiscovered for hours.
What more stark an example could there be, of the way things in our country aren’t working the way they should, than thousands of people lying for hours in corridors in our hospitals, and people dying on those trolleys? This deadly corridor crisis isn’t befitting of the heroic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who work in our NHS. It’s not what we expect from our NHS, and it’s not what we pay our hard-earned money in taxes to fund our NHS for …
With the package we are calling for today, the government could put an end to 12-hour A&E waits altogether, by the end of the year. Never again should anyone have to watch their loved one die on a trolley in a hospital corridor.
The Lib Dems also released this chart showing how the number of 12-hour trolley waits has soared.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s report on Wes Streeting’s speech. (See 9.45am.)
‘If we tell public we can’t make anything work, why would they vote to keep us in charge?’ – Streeting
Here is a fuller version of the quote from Wes Streeting’s speech, from the Times’ Steven Swinford.
Bafflingly, some on my own side of the political divide have begun to parrot the same argument. They complain about the civil service. They blame stakeholder capture.
This excuses culture does the centre-left no favours. If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?
And we should be in no doubt that they are excuses. Back to my shopping trolley analogy: there’s no point complaining about the wonky wheel if you’re letting the trolley have a mind of its own, instead of steering it towards the destination you’re after.
Wes Streeting criticises Labour colleagues who complain about Whitehall not being able to deliver
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has given a speech to the Institute for Government conference this morning.
As Jessica Elgot reports, Streeting criticised politicians who complain about being unable to reform public services because of Whitehall inertia.
New – Streeting goes full throttle on the idea that politicians can’t make the state work and that “nothing happens” when levers are pulled.
“Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. Where there is poor performance, we challenge it.”
He says the complaints are just poor excuses from the right.
“Bafflingly, some on my own side of the political divide have begun to parrot the same argument… If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?”
This was aimed partly at the right. (At the Reform UK press conference yesterday, the party’s latest recruit Nadhim Zahawi was complaining about the “over-mighty bureaucratic inertia that now dominates and runs the country”, for which he claimed Tony Blair was mostly to blame”.)
But Streeting criticised Labour figures who adopt this view too. He may have been thinking of the former adviser to Keir Starmer, Paul Ovenden, who wrote an article for the Times over the holiday period complaining about the “supremacy of the stakeholder state”.
But Starmer has also himself set out this argument – in December 2024, when he said that there were “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”, and again last month, when he said:
My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government.
Streeting’s comment will be seen by some as an implicit dig at Starmer – although he might argue that he was just restating the determination to make the Whitehall machine deliver that the PM himself has also set out.
Home Office says illegal-working raids and arrests at record level
Good morning. British politics in 2026 has to a large extent been preoccupied with foreign affairs, and Donald Trump’s turbocharged neo-imperialism, but domestic problems remain paramount. At the PLP last night, as Pippa Crerar reports, Keir Starmer sought to justify the amount of time he spends on foreign policy by saying it has a direct link to cost of living problems.
And, with immigration and small boats a key issue for voters, the Home Office is today talking up its record on one aspect of this problem.
Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has released figures which, she says, shows that raids to catch people working in the UK illegally have reached “the highest level in British history”. The PA Media write-up is a tad less hyperbolic, saying the figures are at their highest level “since current records began in 2019”.
PA reports:
Some 12,791 visits took place in 2025, up 57% from 8,122 in the previous year, to businesses such as nail bars, car washes, barbers and takeaway shops.
Ministers are seeking to crack down on illegal working in the UK, as part of efforts to deter those coming to the country illegally.
Meanwhile, arrests were also at a record high of 8,971 last year, up nearly 59% compared to 5,647 in 2024 – the previous highest point in data published by the Home Office.
Of those arrested, 1,087 people have been removed from the UK so far …
The Home Office also said visits were up 77% and arrests were up 83% since Labour came to power.
Some 17,483 visits and 12,322 arrests were recorded between July 2024 and December last year, up from 9,894 and 6,725 respectively across January 2023 to June 2024.
Of the arrests, 1,726 people have been returned so far, up 35% on the 1,283 removed from visits in the previous 18-month period.
In a related move, the Home Office is opening a Secure Borders UK TikTok account designed to discourage people from coming to the UK illegally on small boats. The Sun has got some examples of the video if will feature (mostly people being detained, it appears), and its write-up is negative and sarcastic. The headline, “Fury as ‘pathetic’ PM’s ‘laughable’ brainwave to stop Channel migrant dinghies is revealed to be a new TIKTOK ACCOUNT”, sets the tone. But public opinion does not get turned around overnight, and in Labour circles there may be a tiny bit of cheer this morning from the latest YouGov poll for the Times and Sky News showing Reform UK support at its lowest level since April.
There is plenty more domestic politics to come as the day goes on. Here is the agenda for the day.
8.30am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, speaks at the Institute for Government’s annual conference. Other speakers during the day include: Louise Casey, chair of the independent commission into adult social case, at 9.40am; Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and Michael Gove, the former Tory cabinet minister, at 11.45am; Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM, at 2.45pm; and Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, at 4.30pm.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet. There is a political cabinet, and a normal cabinet.
9.30am: Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, holds a press conference in Cardiff
10am: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, holds a press conference to promote a plan to end 12-hour A&E waits. Later he will visit London Air Ambulance.
11am: Starmer hosts Karol Nawrocki, the Polish president, in No 10.
11.30am: Streeting takes questions in the Commons.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.20pm: Shona Robison, the Scottish government’s finance secretary, presents her budget to MSPs.
2.30pm: Kirsty Brimelow, chair of the Bar Council, and other senior legal figures give evidence to the Commons justice committee about plans to restric jury trials; at 3.30pm Sarah Sackman, a justice minister, gives evidence.
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