Jeremy Hunt said there were “enormous pressures on the NHS… with doctors, frontline nurses frankly under unbearable pressure”. But he said the agency had received a lot of money and “we have to do everything we can to find efficiencies.” Around 20,000 people a day wait at least four hours in A&E, NHS England figures show, with many more stuck in hospital corridors waiting for a bed, doctors’ leaders have warned. Rishi Sunak promised to prioritize the NHS in his first speech as prime minister, but sources close to Health Secretary Steve Barclay told The Times he would not ask for money for the service in the Autumn Statement until he had exhausted all options to find cuts. Unison general secretary Christina McAnea accused the Tories of “deliberately destroying the NHS” in a bid to allow an “organisation” to take it over. “Hard things are going to happen if they don’t make the right choices and one of them is that the NHS is almost ready to collapse,” McAnea said. “Forgive me for sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve heard so many people say this now: is it partly a deliberate attempt by the government to destroy the NHS in order to bring in some sort of organization to run it? “I hope they don’t do that, what they don’t do is make the right investment choices in our public services.” It comes as nurses plan to strike for the first time before Christmas. Figures show 7.1 million people in England were waiting for hospital treatment at the end of September, the highest since records began in August 2007. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. When asked about nurses’ pay demands, Hunt said: “I think we have to recognize a hard truth, that if we gave everybody pay rises that beat inflation, inflation would stay, we wouldn’t reduce inflation and that’s why I’m not pretending that there are no difficult decisions”. The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said pay review bodies should work with unions to set “fair but affordable pay rises” for nurses.
