Wes Streeting: I considered private healthcare after finding lump

Wes Streeting has told The Daily T podcast that he had considered using private healthcare after finding a new lump.

The shadow health secretary, who was treated for kidney cancer three years ago, said he had faced the dilemma when he found the lump recently.

He made the comments after Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, ruled out using private healthcare even if a family member faced a long wait for NHS treatment.

Mr Streeting said that he decided that, if the NHS wait was too long, he would have been prepared to face any subsequent “media storm” attached to going private, deeming his health more important.

Speaking to Kamal Ahmed and Camilla Tominey, the Ilford North MP said he had “seriously considered” going private while waiting to be referred for an NHS scan.

“I was actually terrified,” he said. “I gave myself a month. If the NHS can do it within a month, I’m prepared to wait.

“If it’s going to take longer than a month, for my own peace of mind maybe I should just go and pay for a scan, even though I knew, when you’re a shadow health secretary – and especially when you’re a Labour shadow health secretary – there’s a real risk of this becoming a media storm. But I think, like lots of people – well, health’s more important.”

Mr Streeting – who later got the all-clear from an NHS scan – said he respected Sir Keir’s stance, adding: “For Keir, this is so personal. His mum had Still disease, she was a nurse in the NHS, gave her life to the NHS, and when he was by her bedside, she said: ‘Please promise me,  do not go private.’ And I really respect that.”

The shadow health secretary said he wanted to see everyone getting “fair and equal access to healthcare” without having to pay for it.

He has previously said he wants to “hold the door open to the private sector” in order to expand its use by the NHS, and on Monday warned: “The NHS is at serious risk of going bust and not being there for us in the future unless we make the right long-term decisions now.”

He suggested Labour would go further than the Conservatives in changing the way the health service works.

“The Tories now will not touch NHS reform with a bargepole, they see it as so toxic,” he said. “And that’s how we’ve ended up in this appalling position where the NHS is simultaneously receiving more cash that has never been more poorly spent.”

Mr Streeting also told how his Tory father had told him over a Father’s Day lunch that he was now voting Labour for the first time in his life.

“I’ve often talked about my dad as a lifelong, Sun-reading Tory voter, what I would call a traditional pull yourself up by your bootstraps, working class, East End Essex Tory,” he said.

“My dad has become a floating voter and his vote’s up for grabs, and he’s found it hard to contemplate voting Conservative at the general election. And I discovered over lunch for Father’s Day, my dad has in fact voted Labour for the first time in his entire life.”

Mr Streeting, seen as a Blairite, said he hoped “millions of other Conservatives” would follow his father’s direction, seeing Labour as “a changed party”.

On Sunday, Mr Streeting was accused of “letting the cat out of the bag” after saying Labour’s manifesto was not the “sum total” of its spending plans.

On Monday, he said: “One of the things I’ve been trying to do is break, culturally, within the NHS the mindset amongst NHS leaders that more money will be the answer to all of its prayers.”

In a wide-ranging interview, the shadow health secretary also suggested that he could change his stance on assisted dying.

In 2015, he voted in support of a Private Member’s Bill to legalise assisted dying, which was defeated. On Monday, he said he cast that vote in order to ensure the Bill would face further scrutiny, saying no one should assume he would now back a change in the law.

In recent months, following a campaign by Esther Rantzen, many – including Sir Keir – have said Parliament should hold a fresh debate and vote on the law.

Mr Streeting, a practising Anglican, said he was “uncharacteristically conflicted,” on the matter. He said he had seen friends and family in excruciating pain, and had moments where he had thought “if only there were a way we could end this suffering”.

But he added: “There is a moral, ethical and religious argument that says it is not our place to end someone’s life in that way. And I have also, as an Anglican, sympathy for that view too.”

The MP raised other concerns about the risk of “direct or indirect coercion” if assisted dying was legalised.

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