Jeremy Hunt Unpacks Labour's Welfare Catastrophe and the True Cost of Neglecting the NHS

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1:21I was the most disliked politician in the country. I commend this statement to the House.

1:26Rob Moore:Let's say you were the Chancellor again. What would be your first three things you would do? Now the bit I didn't do. A dynamic economy needs animal spirits. If we got the benefits bill down to where it was before the pandemic, that's£47 billion less a year. What do you think of£1.8 billion being spent on the digital ID? That's nonsense. Running a hospital in Britain is far harder than running a footsie company. I've seen it from the inside. There is a structural problem. What do you think the likelihood is of Nigel Farage and reform getting in? And do you think that's a good thing or not a good thing for the country?

2:01I think...

2:04Rob Moore:On and around the budget and just after, does it feel like the Chancellor is the most hated person in Britain? And have you ever felt like the most hated person in Britain? I have but but it wasn't actually after my budgets it was when I was health secretary and the junior doctors went on strike for almost a year Wow and there were in fact some you go polls saying I was the most disliked politician in the country and you're still smiling eyes you know I well how I managed I don't know But I did have some pretty hairy moments. I mean, like, do you want to tell you one of them? Yeah, please. So on one of them, I was, there was a lot.

2:52The thing that I think people sometimes don't appreciate is there's a lot of pressure on your family as well. So Lucia used to worry about what would happen if she needed to take the kids to A &E. and in fact she would have been absolutely fine because doctors have very strong ethics and they would have treated us no differently but you can understand why she was worrying about that because I was such a hate figure with all the the junior doctors and in fact I had laser surgery on my eyes which you can't do on the NHS and I was at Moorfields getting it done privately and it was two days after the junior doctors had announced another wave of strikes and I lay back and I suddenly realized that this operating theatre in Moorfields was just full of junior doctors and they were about to put a laser into my eye, you know, it's like, this is the definition of trust.

3:47But the worst moment was when, so we had an Easter holiday and we were going to stay with, in fact my the friend I started my business with in in who was living in Boston at the time so we booked these tickets and um I had to rush back from a vote in parliament um in order to get the plane to Heathrow and uh you know I was getting the family ready and the kids were probably I don't know they were you know four six and eight sort of thing so young and the doorbell rang and I thought it was the Uber or the taxi or something. And so I opened the door and it was the BBC wanting a comment because that afternoon the junior doctors, the BMA, had announced another wave of strikes.

4:36And I thought they are now going to get a film of me taking my family with suitcases off to Heathrow and this is just going to be disastrous PR. So I thought, what do I do? So I called my government driver and I said, sorry, Keith, I need you to come back and pick me up. I got changed into my suit, back into my suit. I put my jeans in a plastic bag and then I walked out of the front door and did a clip for the BBC saying how disappointed I was there was a strike. And then climbed into the government car and got Keith to drive me around the corner. and then Lucia and the kids got into an Uber, BBC camera gone by this point and they drove around the corner and I switched into my jeans in the back of the car and anyway, by this stage, you know, it was this close to getting the flight and it was a, you know, it was a Friday before the Easter holiday so the roads were absolutely blocked going out of London and we arrived with like 10 minutes to spare before the check-ins closed.

5:47And we got through, and you can imagine there were quite a few tensions in the family at this point about dad and his bloody job. And we got through, and only when we were literally boarding the plane did I remember that, because I got my, I got the family's tickets a long time in advance, but I didn't get my ticket until the last minute because I didn't know about parliamentary voting. The only ticket left was business class. and so basically i was like i thought how do i break this to lucia this is going to be a night and overall sweating away and then now and then basically um i thought i'll just i'm going to settle them in to economy class and uh and then there was this um quite large American lady who complained to the stewardess, the BA stewardess, about having to sit next to my children on the flight.

6:44And I said, Madam, I said, I've got a seat in business class. You have my seat and I'll sit here. And the BA stewardess said, are you sure, sir? And she said, that has never happened in my entire career at BA. And I said, yeah, no. I thought I'll get the glory here well i can and then the purser came along and said sir we have never seen this happen before but actually we've managed to find three seats in business class so uh so i sent lucia and the uh and a couple of kids up and uh and uh i collected my glory which i really needed do labor have a clear plan or a clear vision i think that they came into office with a very mistaken view of what government would be about i think they thought that it was going to be a bit like 1997 and they were taking over an economy that was roaring ahead just you know as as tony blair and gordon brown inherited and all they really needed to do was put up taxes a little, put a bit more into public services, and then they could say, we're the party that put the NHS back on its feet.

7:58Whereas, you know, the world in 2024 is very different, because we've got these very high levels of debt that we've been talking about, that are holding back growth, and some big structural challenges. And I think that's only started to dawn on them now and unfortunately in that process they've lost a lot of political capital so some of the big changes they might have wanted to do now feel too difficult well I really hope they get their mojo back because they're going to be around for you know another three or four years and as a country we need them to succeed.

8:35Rob Moore:I understand now that Labour have increased taxes since they've been in power by 70 billion. Does that sound about right to you? Yeah, it's just, I think it might be 66, but that sort of number, yes. Why are they not looking at reducing their spending? Well, the reason they're not looking at doing it is because they find it very hard, not least because the unions are a very big part of the labour movement. So when it comes to public sector pay awards. Conservatives have a higher tolerance for strikes if there are disagreements on what's fair. And that's not necessarily a good thing, because you saw we had lots of strikes under the previous Conservative government, and they were very disruptive and painful.

9:26But we were prepared to take on the unions when we thought their demands were unreasonable, and Labour is less willing to do that. So that's probably the reason. The other thing is, which I think is, you know, a real mistake is that Labour are trying to hold up this word austerity, which they've turned into a kind of totally negative thing. Whereas, you know, having run my own business, I think you should always be looking to spend money more efficiently and to cut costs where you can. And even more so if you're in charge of the state, which is spending a trillion pounds of taxpayers' money. But they've kind of turned any kind of, you know, demand for more efficiency into a kind of dirty word.

10:11So that's why they're doing it. But the mistake here is that, you know, if you look around the world, there are parts of the world that are doing really well. And it's, you know, North America, It's Asia. It's, you know, even places like China. And what do they all have in common compared to Europe, which is in this, you know, slow lane of economic growth? They all have lower tax rates. And there are, you know, economists will tell you that one of the reasons for that is that if the state spends too much, it stops the private sector growing. It crowds out private sector investment. By the way, the Office for Budget Responsibility also agree with that because they factored in less investment by the private sector as taxes go up.

11:00But I think as business people, and I'm guessing there's quite a few business people in the audience here, we kind of understand there's something different about it, which is that a dynamic economy needs animal spirits. in these people who will go out there and take risks as you've done, Rob, as I've done, as I'm sure people in this room have done, is so we're going to start our own business. We're going to be brave. And one of the things that makes you hesitate is if the rewards aren't worth the effort. And that's the problem with when taxes get too high.

11:33Rob Moore:So I don't know how many hundreds of millions we spend on the NHS and welfare. I would guess it must be hundreds, sorry, billions. I don't know how many hundreds of billions we spend on NHS and welfare. And it doesn't look like they work very well at the moment. Many people are critical of the NHS. When you've had a loved one, in my instance, my dad go through the whole system, I have to say the criticism of the NHS in my experience was right. It would take five or six hours for an ambulance to turn up. It would take days to get seen. He'd have a new doctor every day. Some of them couldn't really speak English.

12:15Rob Moore:It was just, and I remember it when I was young. I don't ever see it not to work. And then welfare, you know, so many people now are rewarded for not working and you're punished for working. And to me, is this not just obvious common sense? And can't they save, because you're an entrepreneur. If you went to buy a company and you saw the management accounts, you could shave off 10 % of those costs. That wouldn't be too difficult. A couple of hard decisions, let go of a couple of suppliers. But you could easily shave 10, 15 % off. That's£150 billion and they're not looking at any of the costs. What do we not understand?

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14:14The first thing is, you're absolutely right to talk about those two areas. Both of them, actually. Welfare and the NHS are about 10 % of our GDP. So that's not our taxes, much bigger percentage of our taxes, but our GDP, of all the wealth we create as a country, about 10 % goes on the NHS and 10 % goes on welfare. Wow. So that is a big amount. And neither of them are working in the way they should. And, you know, let's talk about both of them, but I'm going to talk solutions because I think there are very good solutions to both of them. You are bringing the happiness today. I am trying. Believe you me, it's an effort, but I am trying.

15:02So I'm going to try and talk solutions. First of all, on health, I have to say I was the longest serving health secretary. And so I've seen it from the inside. And I think it needed two big things. And I did do the first and I didn't do the second. and I have to hold my hand up. I did not finish all the reforms that I wanted. So the thing that I really objected to in the NHS when I arrived was that all the focus was on waiting times and not on the quality and safety of care. And we were having these horrific scandals like mid-staffs. I had to deal with that within a few months. So I put in place, I looked around and I thought, the best system we have on this kind of area is the Ofsted system for schools, which calls a spade a spade.

15:54You know, every school is outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate. And if it's inadequate, the head gets changed. And, you know, I thought this is a good system. And so I put that in the NHS. And we do call out poor care now in a way that maybe happened in your dad's case and I'm sorry to hear about that and the NHS when I arrived you were not allowed to talk about bad care in the NHS and people told politicians you know if you if you if you you're open that this this terrible thing has happened and it's a disgrace then you're letting down the service you're demotivating the NHS I said that's nonsense you've got to talk about it if you're going to change it and by the end of my time with that new system in place four million more patients were being treated in good or outstanding hospitals than when I started and I do think that good NHS care is bloody brilliant, it's just not consistent.

16:51Now the bit I didn't do, it is unbelievably wasteful and it's unbelievably difficult to change anything in the NHS and it took me about half or more than half of my time in the NHS to understand that there is a structural problem. I'm not one of these people, by the way, who wants to privatise the NHS or dismantle it. I love the values it stands for. But if you're going to have a free system, you've got to work out how you're going to create the incentives for efficiency and good customer service that you would get in the private sector that you're not going to get in a system that is free. And the thing that's stopping that happening is that it is completely overrun with targets.

17:39So I mean, you know, Stalin would be proud. It puts his tractor factories to shame frankly I mean the average hospital chief executive by the way running a hospital in Britain is far harder than running a FTSE company I really take my hat off to those guys. They have 18 monthly operational targets, you know, it's A &E Cancer elective waiting times. That's 18 and they're monthly So the moment you arrive, someone from NHS England is on the blower saying to you, well, what are you going to do to improve targets 3, 7, and 14? And by the way, the next figures are going to be reported on Tuesday week.

18:20And no hospital in the rest of the world is run like that, not in France or Germany or America. So the chance to make transformational change, which business people completely understand is what you're trying to do, is minimal. Like if you want a new IT system, it's really hard to get the bandwidth to put in a brand new IT system that's going to make everything a lot more efficient and digital because you're held on such a short leash. So we should scrap all those targets. Now, I did want to do that, and I did reduce them dramatically, but I thought if I scrap them when we're not hitting them, everyone's going to point fingers and say, oh, he's just scrapping the targets because he wasn't hitting them.

19:03so my plan was actually to hit the targets and then get rid of them and and i didn't i didn't get around to it unfortunately so uh there's a mayor culpa there um but the result is massive waste by the way because you know if you're desperately trying to get these 18 operational targets how much do you really care about whether you're buying your blue paper from the cheapest supplier or whatever it is and you know now compare that to now this is the positive schools British state schools are an unsung success story they have become in the last 25 years the best state schools in Europe and some of the best in the world we have the highest reading standards in the western world now in our state schools I went to private school somewhere called Charterhouse and in the 1980s you know middle class families would say if you can possibly avoid state education, go private, because you can't trust state schools.

19:57We don't say that now. If you've got a good or outstanding Ofsted school, you know, people are happy to send their kids there. And that is because we don't have any of these targets. We give all the money to heads, we say, and governing bodies, and we say, you've got Ofsted, we're going to publish your exam results. You know, if you get a bad Ofsted, you'll get fired. But after that, it's up to you. And And when you go into a state school, you never see any waste. They are so careful with their money because, you know, every penny is theirs. And they know that if they can save it, you know, on one thing, they can use it for a new playground or whatever.

20:32So that's the model we need to adopt. And then just very quickly on the benefits one. This one is so ripe for reform. And I cannot understand why we didn't hear this yesterday. Every day in the last year, 2 ,200 people on average have been signed off, not just having to work, but they don't even have to look for work. And it's a number that has mushroomed since the pandemic. It was going down until that point, but it's got really bad. And, you know, most of them are for mental health reasons, anxiety and depression. and every doctor I ever met said if you've got anxiety or depression the one thing you need is social contact uh you know so that means being at work not at home and what we should be saying to all those people is you know we should be saying uh look we're going to treat your anxiety or depression but we're not going to give you benefits and um you know if we got the benefits bill down to where it was before the pandemic, that's£47 billion less a year within five years.

21:37You wouldn't have had a single tax rise yesterday. And, you know, if you wanted the whole... The NHS actually has a really good talking therapies service for anxiety and depression, the mild and moderate anxiety and depression. People from Sweden come and have a look at it. It's very well respected. Costs a billion quid a year. so you could literally double the number of people getting treatment for anxiety and depression that's how i'd use one of the 47 billion that i save and say we're not putting on welfare and so anyway there really are solutions and i i think it's a massive shame we didn't hear that yesterday but on the other hand you know i've got something that i can argue for is what we need to do

22:22Rob Moore:is there wastage in the civil service? Absolutely. I mean, you know, when I, and I think that we need some big reform of the civil servants, you will not find me criticising the individual civil servants who work for me because I found them to be really hardworking, really decent, and I always felt they gave their all. and so I you know I think that individually they are great people but everyone has to work within the structure they're given and in the civil service I mean in the treasury for example I said can we stop everyone working from home because I was fed up with you know every meeting I had to have this giant tv screen in front of me because you know there'd be four or five people dialing in.

23:13And I was told, no, because we haven't got enough desks now. And I discovered the treasury contract is that you have to work from home. You have to work from home for three days a fortnight. And that's the system that they are doing. And don't get me wrong, I think there are times when working from home is a big advance. I think for young parents with kids it can be a really positive thing to help people get back to work more quickly than they might otherwise have been able to do and I actually think for people at the other end of their lives in their in their 60s it'd be better for the economy if people work part-time than completely retired and so if working from home is part of the mix fine but for most businesses I think it is really bad for productivity and creativity and team spirit and the fizz and the buzz that you need and that is something where the culture is completely wrong so I you know it's something that I absolutely wanted to sort out and you know had I been around for long we'd have got to it I did though say that I was going to reduce the size of the civil service to the levels it was before the pandemic.

24:34And that was how I was going to pay for the increased money we're spending on defence. Saves about four billion a year. And that was cancelled by my successor. Within two weeks of them coming into office, they cancelled the reduction in the size of the civil service. I do not know why. Wow.

24:51Rob Moore:And what do you think of Rachel Reeves continuing to blame the Conservatives for all the mess that we're in right now? Because she did it at the budget again. the conservative legacy. Well, the reason that part of the reason she's doing it is because George Osborne very successfully pinned on Labour in 2010, the fact that the previous Labour government had run out of money. And you know, he used phrases like they didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining. And he, he kind of won that argument with the British people. and then Conservatives were re-elected in 2015. So I think that what Rachel Reeves is trying to do is a repeat of that.

25:37And, you know, there was politics in what George Osborne was doing, and in some ways he was right, but in some ways he was wrong. I mean, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown actually did a very good job in the financial crisis. I mean, they marshaled finance ministers around the world to inject liquidity into the global economy, to stop banks going bust, which would have, you know, bankrupted all our economies. Very, very difficult times. And in that crisis, they didn't do a bad job at all. And, you know, I think they obviously made other mistakes. But so there's an element of politics in all of this.

26:14But what I would say to Rachel is, you know, you can do your political thing. But, you know, you've got to have a plan to go with it. and as George Osborne was presenting that narrative, he was also cutting public spending by 19 % in real terms. I mean, much bigger cuts than Margaret Thatcher ever did. And so he was taking very brave decisions and that's what I'm not really seeing from the government. I'd like to know what the plan is. Yesterday I was really hoping we would see what their plan is for economic growth. I get that they don't want cutting taxes to be part of it, but there's lots of other things you can do planning reform for example you know welfare reform um you know public sector productivity there are you know there are lots and lots of things you know the nhs 10 of the economy what that actually means is that if you improved uh nhs productivity growth to two percent a year which is long-term rate in the private sector It actually has an impact on our actual GDP numbers because it's 10 % of the economy.

27:23It actually adds, you know, 0.1, 0.2 % annual GDP growth. And that's in the direct control of the government. So that's why I think that's what you really need is a plan.

27:36Rob Moore:Is Rachel Reeves actually qualified to be the UK Chancellor? I think, you know, I'm her predecessor. And I think I like to keep politics sort of civil. So and people can grow into their roles.

27:57That was a very political answer. Well, I was a baby can grow into an adult. But I just think that in this situation, you know, the country is stuck with these very low levels of growth. And, you know, I think her instincts are perfectly sensible on lots of things. And I was hoping we would see. I mean, let me give you an example. Planning. That's something where they've got a big majority in Parliament. and if parliament decides that we want to build a nuclear power station so in fact she was in anglesey where we're going to build one of these new small modular reactors which is great and i actually started the ball rolling on that and i'm really pleased that she's carrying on on that and i do think we need more nuclear power um and uh you know so she and i are on the same page on that.

28:59But the planning process, once Parliament's decided that it's going to build a nuclear power station and the Treasury said we're going to be good for the money, it takes eight to ten years to get planning approval. And that is just ridiculous. Pretty much does in Peterborough as well