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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has set out his party’s plan to tackle the NHS crisis and reduce the acute backlog in appointment waiting times on the first day of his party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Sunday.
Labour said that investing £1.1bn to fund overtime at weekends and evening shifts could enable the health service to provide an extra 2mn appointments in the first year of a new Labour government.
Starmer said the overtime plan was a voluntary scheme but NHS staff “are up for this because they know that bringing down the waiting list will reduce the pressure on them in the long run”.
He told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “They want to do this just as much as we do and it is desperately needed.”
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has failed to close the polling gap with Labour amid dissatisfaction with his leadership from within his party which has been in power since 2010.
But the opposition Labour party is under pressure to spell out its plans for government amid widespread public confusion about what it would do if it won the general election expected next year.
Since winning the leadership three years ago, Starmer has shifted the party to the right, rejecting the more radical policies of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
Yet a “word cloud” of public opinions about Starmer, commissioned by the BBC, heavily featured the words “nothing”, “don’t know” and “not sure”.
Starmer earlier on Sunday warned his party not to get “giddy” after its emphatic by-election win in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election on Friday, as it maintained a 16-point national poll lead ahead of the Conservatives.
Shadow ministers were ordered not to appear triumphal or to refer to Starmer as “the next prime minister” for fear of looking complacent during the four-day conference.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said a Labour government would pay for the overtime policy by scrapping “non-domiciled tax status”, which it believes would raise £2bn to spend on the NHS and on free breakfast clubs for primary schools.
Non-dom status exempts some UK residents who have their permanent home outside the country from paying UK tax on foreign income.
Labour had previously allocated the money from scrapping non-dom status towards training thousands more doctors and nurses, a policy which has since been adopted by the Tory government.
Unions and health leaders welcomed the proposals to cut the backlog in waiting times.
Christina McAnea, general secretary of the Unison public sector trade union, said the policy was “fine as a stop-gap measure” which made sense in the short term.
“The priority must be to retain existing staff and encourage more temporary workers to go on the books and become directly employed NHS employees,” she said. “There must also be a properly funded recruitment campaign to fill the thousands of NHS vacancies.”
Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, said it welcomed any attempt to address care backlogs at a record high. “However it is critical that underlying issues facing healthcare also be addressed.”
He added: “There are more than 125,000 staff shortages in the NHS with official figures showing nearly a third of the existing workforce feel burnt out.”
Meanwhile, deputy party leader Angela Rayner used her conference speech to promise to deliver “the biggest boost to affordable and social housing for a generation”, including council housing. Rayner accused the Conservative party of “looking down” on council tenants.
Britain is suffering from a housing shortage that has been exacerbated, according to analysts, by the mass sell-off of former council houses through the “Right to Buy” programme initiated by then Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Rayner also promised to give first-time buyers “first dibs” when buying new developments in their communities and vowed to implement “no-fault evictions” — a pledge made by the Tories in their 2019 manifesto that has yet to be delivered.
She also said a Labour government would bolster workers’ rights with a ban on zero-hours contracts within 100 days of an election win.
Separately, Bridget Phillipson, shadow education secretary, suggested that Labour could bring back maintenance grants for poorer students by increasing the debt burden on wealthier graduates.
The conference started a day after Hamas launched its biggest attack inside Israel in decades, killing hundreds of people and taking others captive.
Starmer condemned the “appalling act of terrorism” by Hamas on Israel, while shadow foreign secretary David Lammy told a fringe event that it was “hugely important to be clear that Israel has a right to self-defence and to defend itself against terrorism”.
The remarks served as a warning to hard left, pro-Palestine activists within the party not to embarrass the leadership by defending Hamas’ violence or questioning Israel’s right to retaliate.
Labour is particularly wary of criticism of Israel spilling over into antisemitism after the party broke equalities law when it failed to curb antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Starmer made the introduction of a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Jewish conduct a priority when he took over as leader.
Prominent Jewish figures in the Labour party welcomed Starmer and Lammy’s interventions on the atrocities in Israel. Mike Katz, national chair of Jewish Labour Movement, said the pair’s responses had been “spot on and of a piece with the government”.
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