When Labour left office, NHS waiting lists were at a record low and public satisfaction at an all-time high.
You could get a GP appointment within 48 hours. In A&E, the vast majority of patients – 98% – were seen within four hours.
An authoritative global body, the Commonwealth Fund, judged that the NHS was the best health service in the world.
Here we are 13 years on and just look at it now. The NHS has been brought to its knees and it is desperately sad to see.
I am not saying Labour got everything right. The private sector was allowed to encroach too far and unacceptable care failures should have been spotted earlier. The much-needed reform of social care was left too late.
All that said, it is unarguable that the last Labour Government got a huge amount right on the NHS.
Having inherited a service in a similar position to the one it’s in now, we oversaw a massive turn-around in its fortunes.
Different people will have different explanations as to how this was achieved.
I am 100% clear about the main reason: a crucial decision by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the early 2000s to invest in its most important asset – the NHS workforce.
In the Tory 90s, just like the Tory 20s, NHS pay and staff shortages were big issues.
Coming into Government, Labour initially stuck to Tory spending limits.
It was soon clear waiting lists would not fall without (a) major investment and (b) a significant part of it being devoted to recruiting more staff and paying them fairly.
So, a new national pay framework – Agenda for Change – was duly introduced and it underpinned the improvement of the NHS in the years that followed.
There’s a simple moral to this the story: the NHS will only look after us well if it looks after its own staff. This is something the Tory Party has never understood.
One of the early acts of the Cameron Government was an attempt to break up Agenda for Change with a new regional system.
At the time, I remember visiting Bristol and speaking to an A&E nurse about it.
She said management had been around the wards asking staff to sign new contracts, replacing their 37.5-hour working week with a 41-hour week.
“What did you do?”, I asked her.
“I signed it”, she replied, quick as a flash.
“Why?”
“Because I currently do a 45-hour week but they don’t realise that. If they want to play it that way, I’ll just do 41.”
This conversation has always stuck in my mind.
The NHS is more than the sum of its parts because of the goodwill of its staff and what they give to it without being paid.
If you lose that goodwill, you lose the NHS.
Right now, it is hanging in the balance.
If Rishi Sunak is to have any hope of fulfilling his waiting time promises, he needs the workforce with him.
Prime Minister, pay them fairly and put our NHS back on its feet.
