
SIR KEIR STARMER’S 10-year plan for the NHS focuses on technology while “sidestepping” staffing shortages and crumbling infrastructure, unions and health campaigners warned today.
The Prime Minister has unveiled Labour’s 165-page “bricks to clicks” plan, which aims to shift the majority of outpatient care away from hospitals by 2035.
By 2028, the NHS app would be “a full front door to the entire” NHS, wearable technology could become the “standard in preventative, chronic and post-acute NHS treatment by 2035” while community outreach, with people going door-to-door, could reduce pressure on GPs and A&E, the policy document claims.
Speaking alongside Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Chancellor Rachel Reeves at an east London health centre, Sir Keir said: “I want in 10, 20, 30 years for people to look back and say this was the government that seized the moment and reformed the NHS so it’s fit for the future.”
But the SOS NHS coalition of front-line workers, patients and campaigners warned Labour’s vision “appears reliant on workforce cuts … while sidestepping the real crisis of underfunding and understaffing.”
Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr Tony O’Sullivan said: “Wes Streeting thinks AI and robotics can replace skilled health professionals. But the NHS runs on people, not apps.
“This plan isn’t about recovery — it’s about managed decline. A 10-year roadmap for a more commercialised, underfunded and undemocratic NHS.”
Just Treatment director Diarmaid McDonald said: “Instead of funnelling ever-increasing sums of taxpayer’s money to these private corporations, the government should be delivering urgently needed increased investment into rebuilding our NHS infrastructure and workforce.”
Unison general secretary Christina McAnea added that the plans will only work if the suggested neighbourhood centres “are in decent buildings and staff are treated fairly.”
She added: “Thousands of community health employees currently have to work from their cars, or in crumbling clinics without support or functioning IT.”
Royal College of Nursing general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger said: “Ministers are right to exploit the advances of technology in the plan, but they shouldn’t be seduced by them while tens of thousands of nursing posts lay empty.”
In the Commons, MPs warned Mr Streeting that “you can’t fix the NHS without fixing social care” amid calls to bring forward the end date of the Casey Commission, which aims to set out a plan to implement a national care service.

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