WES STREETING’S self-published messages with Peter Mandelson in March 2025 have gloriously backfired on him, but two elements have so far been missed and they relate to his very role as health secretary.

When Mandelson bewails the lack of an economic philosophy and of “a programme of policies” Streeting responds: “No growth strategy at all.”

Odd, because Streeting, secretary of state for health, was at very moment drafting his Ten Year Health Plan for England, published in July 2025, which proclaims the transformation of the NHS “into an engine for economic growth rather than simply a beneficiary of it … Too often, the NHS expects the proceeds of growth, without delivering on its means to create it.”

Developed in conjunction with the plan for health and published in the same month was the Life Sciences sector plan, with a dedicated strategy covering medicines and medical technologies. Streeting has put his signature and his cheery boyish face to this plan which states: “The Life Sciences Sector Plan is strongly supported by the broader Industrial Strategy, which sets out cross-cutting interventions to drive growth and innovation.”

And that Industrial Strategy, in train for some time but not published until last November, claims to represent “nothing less than a whole-government effort, with ambitious plans for eight high-growth sectors.”

There are two possibilities to explain Streeting’s inconsistency. Either he is a sycophant and anxious to agree with Mandelson or he was being frank and his policies for growth are flim-flam.

In another part of the exchange with Mandelson, Streeting proclaims his view that Israel is perpetrating war crimes, and yet it is under his watch as secretary of state for health that the contract with Palantir is being pushed through. Palantir is used extensively by the Israeli and US military and intelligence services, where its systems have targeted and killed unarmed Palestinians.

In November 2023 under the Conservative government, Palantir was awarded a £330m contract to build and operate a system to hold and analyse patient data across the NHS — the Federated Data Platform (FDP). The contract in effect dates back to 2020 when, during the Covid crisis, Palantir accepted a fee of £1 for trialling its system, giving it the foot in the door to the NHS.

Shortly after the 2024 election, and when Streeting was health secretary, the then chief operating officer for NHS England Dame Emily Lawson wrote to all NHS trusts asking them to confirm “that [they] plan to adopt the NHS FDP in the next two years.” What had initially been framed as voluntary uptake, Streeting’s NHSE effectively made obligatory. Doctors and trusts themselves are sceptical of the effectiveness of the FDP and its adoption is not proceeding to pace — but that is no thanks to Streeting.

Ironically, however, Streeting is right about a lack of growth strategy, but not in the way he presumably means. For what are paraded as new, shiny and innovative ideas for growth are really a blustery rehash of Tory policies but with a pro-business, deregulatory purpose on steroids. The policies’ main purpose seems to be an invitation to healthcare conglomerates, big tech and City moneylenders to get “filthy rich,” as Mandelson so eloquently put it.

The Industrial Strategy proclaims: “The government will make it easier and simpler for companies to do business, giving them the stability to make long-term investments. We will do this by easing the investor journey, and tackling the blockers that undermine confidence and stop them investing in the UK’s future growth.”

One such company that intends to get rich, or even richer, is of course Palantir, but its NHS contract is just one in a much larger plan to allow private mining of 78 years of the NHS’s almost unrivalled store of comprehensive  and ongoing health data.

The Industrial Strategy sees all the datasets created in government not as social but as commercial assets. It identifies eight high-growth potential sectors in the economy and urges government departments responsible for them to “capitalise on the value of UK data by treating it as an economic asset, enabling the use of high-quality data across the private and public sectors … and establishing a clear framework to value and license public-sector data assets.”  

One of these sectors is life sciences and its sector plan outlines six headline actions for investment in a sort of data infrastructure. The Health Data Research Service will get £600m to “create the world’s most advanced, secure and AI-ready health data platform. It will unite genomic, diagnostic and clinical data at population scale, turning NHS and wider healthcare data into a magnet for global trials and AI investment.”

There is also £650m over five years for Genomics England and £520m to attract “mobile” manufacturing to Britain to be disbursed via a life sciences innovative manufacturing fund.

Attracting life sciences investment to Britain means deregulation and support for data centres. Clinical trials are to be speeded up to “cut delays that deter investors,” the regulation of medicines is to be “streamlined” to give industry “a clearer route to market,” and there is to be “low-friction procurement” in the NHS of the resulting drugs and medical devices.

The life sciences plan outlines new “regional health innovation zones,” which sound like a further development of the AI growth zones (“where investment can happen quickly and confidently”) and special economic zones. These form a major party of another Starmer strategy, for infrastructure, and provide tax and regulatory incentives to corporations.

The 10 Year Health Plan includes the much-heralded shift “from analogue to digital” and is framed in terms of the promise of a host of beneficial technical breakthroughs and patients’ convenience. But viewed in the light of these wider policies the “digital transformation” of the NHS appears as a means to promote systems and devices (privately developed) to collect and collate data (which can be licensed to the private sector). Moreover it shows where we the patients fit into the broader plans: we supply the data.

Three main mechanisms are outlined. First a single patient record across the NHS. It presents nice pickings for private contractors who famously botched the last Labour attempt. Second is the use of the NHS app, the so-called “digital front door” to funnel all patient interaction with the NHS. Finally the plan burbles on about the bets it is taking on five “transformative technologies” — data, AI, genomics, “wearables” and robotics to “personalise care,” and raise productivity.

None of these is new and they could improve healthcare, but they also promise juicy contracts for producers of medical devices and instruments, data storage and AI. Increasingly patient take-up of the app and other devices is becoming unavoidable if we want any healthcare from the NHS.

Of course, to make the plan seem plausible it has to ignore the potential dangers and limitations of such digital enabling. Research shows modest productivity gains from AI adoption overall, one influential report estimating just 0.7 per cent over the next decade — the plan seeks 2 per cent increase in NHS productivity each year for the next three years. The technology is uncertain and potentially dangerous, yet simultaneously the health plan intends to speed up clinical trials and procurement mechanisms.

Finally, the approach takes no account of the fact that people want face-to-face interaction with a caring professional, and palming them off with an app and other technologies is nothing short of brutal. It is a bleak future but then it’s all in the cause of growth. Or not, according to Streeting.

Geoffrey Hinton, a founder of AI robotics, has warned that “if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority.” Technologies which can prove of great benefit to humankind become inhuman in the hands of a profit-driven system. And people who wink at the exploits of the “Epstein class” are unlikely to be overly concerned about our safety.

Digital transformation of the NHS is not the only reason to be alarmed about the Ten Year Health Plan: a further article will outline why.