The Government describes the Ten Year Health Plan for England as “part of the government’s health mission to build a health service fit for the future. It sets out how the government will reinvent the NHS through 3 radical shifts: 1) hospital to community   2) analogue to digital   3) sickness to prevention”

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for the Plan on GOV.UK (3rd July 2025)
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Published in July 2025, analysis quickly highlights that this “plan” for the NHS focuses on technology and appears reliant on workforce cuts … while sidestepping the real crisis of underfunding, understaffing and crumbling infrastructure.

Press statement from SOS NHS (3rd July 2025):
As the Government unveils its much-awaited NHS 10 Year Health Plan, some key members of the 50-strong SOS NHS coalition – made up of frontline NHS workers, patients, campaigners and public interest groups – warn that the strategy appears reliant on workforce cuts and new technology to solve all the problems, while sidestepping the real crisis of underfunding and understaffing.
Despite a reported funding shortfall estimated by the British Medical Association at £423 billion since 2009/10, the plan leans heavily on three assumptions: that community care, prevention, and digital technology can solve the crisis without any significant new investment.
But the numbers tell a different story: fewer beds, fewer staff, flat capital budgets, and no boost to community services. With record waiting lists, worsening health inequalities, and a workforce on the brink, the plan includes no increase in capital investment, no proper funding for community-based services, and no dedicated, credible workforce strategy.
In 2022 the RCEM estimated that 13,000 more beds and tens of thousands more staff were urgently needed, the plan prioritises elective operations in the private sector. This risks accelerating the exodus of NHS professionals into private providers, on top of the damaging cuts imposed on trusts, causing them to cut tens of thousands of staff.
The plan highlights a growing reliance on the private sector to deliver elective care – a model that reduces NHS capacity while leaving complex, costly cases to already overstretched NHS teams. Staffing shortages, already crippling the system, will deepen further. Professor Allyson Pollock’s recently published research shows that outsourcing elective care worsens health inequalities yet this plan doubles down on failed models.
It postpones any meaningful shift of resources into primary or community care until the end of the plan period (c.2035), and fails to put forward a coherent plan for recruiting and retaining NHS staff. These omissions fatally undermine the credibility of its ambitions.
In addition, the plan concedes that for the first three years, it will focus mostly on reducing the elective waiting list. Much of the proposed transformation is deferred until after 2029, leaving future governments to grapple with implementation and consequences.
The plan also makes a deeply flawed claim: that NHS care in 2010 delivered quality services despite below-average European funding – implying that increased investment is neither needed nor desirable. This flies in the face of well-established evidence. Blair-era investment to match EU averages delivered the longest sustained improvement in NHS history. Campaigners warn that reversing this approach now, after a pandemic and a decade of austerity, is a betrayal of both patients and staff.
Its reliance on innovative medicines and AI and digital tools – like the NHS App replacing GPs or “virtual hospitals” bypassing primary care – signals an untested experiment with no clinical evidence base which seems to be motivated in large part by a desire to fuel economic growth and meet the demands of big tech and pharmaceutical corporation lobbyists. It gambles the future of patient care on unproven systems, without serious reflection on the likely costs of this tech, and despite major concerns about accuracy, bias and safety, while ignoring social care entirely. It also proposes mass genome sequencing of babies, raising deep ethical and practical questions as well as undermining tried and tested approaches to screening. Without public debate or consent, the government risks creating a privately run genetic surveillance system that could increase inequalities, damage trust, and divert resources from essential child health services as well as leave families without adequate clinical support post diagnosis.
This is a plan that talks up transformation but retreats from the values that underpin the NHS: universal, comprehensive, publicly funded and publicly provided care. SOS NHS members are calling for a real plan, one that confronts the workforce crisis, invests in infrastructure and public health, fixes social care, and puts patients – not profits – at the centre of care.
Dr Tony O’Sullivan, Co-Chair of Keep Our NHS Public and retired Consultant Paediatrician, said:
“We’re on the brink of disaster. Everyone knows the NHS urgently needs rebuilding—from staff morale and workforce numbers to crumbling buildings and outdated equipment. Everyone, it seems, except the Labour government. Wes Streeting thinks AI and robotics can replace skilled health professionals. But the NHS runs on people, not apps. Technology should support staff, not substitute them. You can’t fix a capacity crisis with clever reorganisation or slogans about prevention. Safe community care often costs more in the short term and relies on skilled staff working alone in people’s homes—often uncovering unmet need. Prevention doesn’t replace the duty to treat. Delays to care are already causing over 16,000 avoidable deaths a year. Meanwhile, there is no ‘spare’ capacity in the private sector that doesn’t drain staff and funding from the NHS. Shifting work to for-profit providers fragments care and undermines equity. This plan isn’t about recovery—it’s about managed decline. A 10-year roadmap for a more commercialised, underfunded and undemocratic NHS.”
Diarmaid McDonald, Director at Just Treatment, said:
“Wes Streeting thinks the NHS crisis will be solved by taking even more power and control from staff and patients, and handing it over to private companies. New tech can play an important role in improving outcomes, but the techno-utopianism on display in these plans betrays a failure to properly address the threats they can also pose to an effective and equitable health system. Private health, big tech and big pharma companies will never truly have patients’ interests at heart – their primary motivation is profit, yet right now the government is re-writing NHS policies and plans to make our health service a playground for tech and pharma bros. 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.”
Dr Julia Patterson, founder and CEO of EveryDoctor, said:
“This Labour government came to power saying they’d rebuild the NHS. In its current state, I can’t see how this plan will do that. Social care isn’t addressed, there’s insufficient funding to realise these goals, and we need a robust workforce plan. The public deserves better than this; because every patient deserves to access safe, timely care in the NHS, and every staff member deserves to be properly supported.” 
Muge, NHS Patient Leader at Just Treatment, said:
“I nearly died after a 12-hour A&E wait, and I fear that this plan will do very little to stop this happening to other patients. We have fewer hospital beds than any other western healthcare system, alongside critical staffing shortages and a broken social care system – where is the investment to address these fundamental threats and overcome 15 years of chronic underfunding? This government likes to pay lip service to the patient voice, yet they’re also abolishing the bodies that are supposed to advocate for patients, further stripping away the few meaningful routes we have to make ourselves heard. Patients expect this government to restore our NHS as a world-beating public healthcare system. On this evidence, that is not going to happen.”
Mark Ladbrooke, Secretary of the Socialist Health Association, said:
“Labour’s proudest achievement was the creation of the NHS. This government has a choice; either rebuilding it as a public service including community care, tackling the social causes of ill health and using the best technology available or, alternatively, turning it into a market place for unaccountable inefficient and costly corporate interests. Time and time again labour movement organisations, including the Labour Party itself, have demanded the former – we fear much in these proposals will simply promote a £200bn market for unaccountable business interests.”
The above information is provided by the national KONP website (3rd July 2025):

CLICK HERE

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From John Lister in The Lowdown (8th July 2025):

 

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for “Ten Year Plan – A tour of the dead ends”
and

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for “Labour and Private Sector – an unequal marriage”
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The campaign organisation We Own It identifies five ways in which the 10 year health plan gets it wrong:
1) The government wants to introduce new private finance into the NHS
2) The waste of privatisation will continue – no mention of insourcing
3) The government is using technology to sneak privatisation into the NHS
4) Car park and corridor care is barely mentioned
5) No plan to match the funding levels of other European countries

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for the full article from We Own It (4th July 2025)
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CLICK HERE

for the statement from the SOS NHS coalition (3rd July 2025)
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Links:

Guardian   (24th September 2025)      Fears of new PFI-style ‘disaster’ as firms handed £6m to advise on using private funds for NHS clinics
Chronicle    (22nd August 2025)     ‘Not yet clear’ how huge NHS redundancies will be paid for, says North East health boss
Morning Star   (17th July 2025)  Privately funded neighbourhood health services will only serve as ‘ATMs for investors’, campaigners warn
John Lister, The Lowdown  (8th July 2025)    Ten Year Plan – A Tour of the Dead Ends
John Lister, The Lowdown  (8th July 2025)      Labour and Private Sector – an unequal marriage
Keep Our NHS Public  (3rd July 2025)    NHS Ten Year Health Plan Risks Long-Term Damage: “Not recovery, but managed decline”
Morning Star (3rd July 2025)  Starmer’s new NHS plan ‘sidesteps’ staffing and infrastructure issues, unions and campaigners say
The Guardian   (3rd July 2025)      Starmer outlines 10-year plan to change NHS ‘from sickness service to health service’
The Guardian   (2nd July 2025)     Will Labour’s 10-year health plan usher in a ‘new era’ for the NHS in England?
Guardian (6th January 2025)   Private sector’s role in cutting NHS waiting lists in England to rise by 20%
Keep Our NHS Public – article by Dr John Puntis, Co-Chair (19th January 2025)     Starmer delivers wrong prescription
University of Oxford (29th February 2024)    New study links hospital privatisation to worse patient care
Youtube (8th January 2025) Three ways Keir Starmer could expand NHS capacity    – click video below
The Skwawkbox     (21st October 2024)    Streeting’s NHS slash-and-burn ’10-year plan’: close hospitals, privatise, coerce, ration, deny
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