Reform UK’s private health insurance plan would cost £1.7bn, Streeting to say

Wes Streeting is expected to say that Nigel Farage’s plans would bring a system that ‘checks your pockets before your pulse and asks for your credit card before your care’. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Reform UK’s policy of tax relief on private health insurance could cost the country £1.7bn, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, is expected to say on Saturday.

Streeting will make the claim at a conference organised by the Fabian Society, a socialist thinktank aligned to the Labour party, and will describe the Reform proposal as a “tax cut for the wealthiest”.