With less than three weeks to go until the U.K. elects its next government, its main political parties have released their main campaign pledges.
At a time when the country’s public health system is battling massive waits for emergency care, elective procedures, dentistry and more, the health policies of each party are crucially important to voters.
In fact, health often ranks as the most important issue to British public.
So who are the U.K.’s main parties and what are their health plans?
The main political parties
The three major parties are the Conservatives, led by Rishi Sunak, the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, and the Liberal Democrats, led by Ed Davey.
The Conservatives — often referred to as the ‘Tories’ — had been in power for 14 years when Sunak announced a snap election last month. Although they won the last general election in 2019 with a large majority, the party’s population has plummeted over the last three years. It traditionally sits on the right of the political spectrum.
The lefter-leaning Labour Party last led government under the helm of Gordon Brown in 2010, when they lost to the Conservative’s David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg. The party has gone through significant upheaval in recent years following the replacement of former leader Jeremy Corbyn with the more centrist Starmer.
The Liberal Democrats are a smaller, centrist party known for their pro-European Union values. Their popularity dwindled in the early 2010s after their Conservative-led coalition government substantially increased university tuition fees.
But a stunt-filled campaign from current leader Ed Davey (featuring rollercoasters, obstacle coasters, paddleboards and dinosaur statues) has caught the nation’s attention. Polls suggest the Lib Dems are on track to make significant gains, but they’re likely to remain dwarfed by the other two major parties.
What do the parties promise on health?
U.K. parties publish detailed manifestos outlining their policy proposals ahead of general elections.
According to their manifesto, the Conservatives want to increase the role of pharmacists as frontline health providers, improve and expand family doctor facilities and build dozens of new community-based diagnostic centres.
They also say they’ll train tens of thousands of new nurses and doctors over the next five years, as well as more clinicians like paramedics and dentists. Controversially, it plans to cut around 5,000 management roles.
The party says it see the promises of previous Conservative governments through, constructing dozens of new hospital buildings promised by former prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020 and implementing legislation that effectively prevents many teens from ever buying tobacco products.
The Labour Party says its government would provide 40,000 more publicly-funded operations, appointments and scans a week to help improve waiting times.
The party promises to modernise the health service’s digital systems, ageing hospital estate and imaging tech, doubling the number of CT and MRI scanners.
It also pledges to make childbirth safer, and close the mortality gap between Black and Asian mothers and their white peers. At present, Black and Asian women are far more likely to die in childbirth in the U.K.
Like the Conservatives, Labour plans to recruit more dentists and provide more dental appointments. The party also promises to hire thousands more mental health staff and tackle racial disparities in mental health detentions.
It wants to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between those living in the most and least deprived areas by addressing social determinants of health.
The Liberal Democrats pledge to give members of the public the right to see a family doctor within a week, employing 8,000 more general practitioners to achieve this goal.
They have similar goals for dentistry and cancer, promising to make sure all cancer patients start treatment within 62 days of an urgent hospital referral and ensure everyone who needs urgent or emergency dental treatment can see a publicly-funded dentist.
The party wants to cut mental health service waiting times by introducing community hubs for young people and standard mental health check-ups.
Like Labour, the Lib Dems focus on population health and social determinants of health like poverty. They want to increase healthy life expectancy by 5 years.
All three parties promise to invest in social care services and staff, with Labour even promising to set up a “National Care Service” to complement the existing National Health Service.
What’s actually going to happen?
Reducing those headline waits for elective and emergency care is likely to be a key target for any new government.
Pre-election polls strongly suggest a win for Labour and significant growth for the Liberal Democrats. So it’s reasonable to assume Labour’s policies are the ones to watch. But whoever gets in, how closely they will stick to their manifesto is far harder to predict.
Health think tank the Nuffield Trust says all three parties are promising more than they can realistically finance. Many proposed policies are likely to shrink in scale or simply never make it to the table.
