Wes Streeting is Britain's health secretary under Keir Starmer. He is a cancer survivor and was 42 years old as of 2025. On the day after Labour's landslide election victory in July 2024, he declared the NHS "broken".
Mr Streeting commissioned Ara Darzi, a Labour peer and surgeon, to diagnose the NHS's failings. Lord Darzi traced the malaise to the 2010s, when Conservative governments oversaw a de facto spending freeze that restricted nurses, hospital beds and scanners. Mr Streeting's forthcoming ten-year plan proposes three big shifts: delivering more care outside hospitals and closer to homes; replacing paper records, pagers and slow computers with new technology; and investing in prevention rather than treatment. Adding a healthy year of life through public-health measures costs around a quarter as much as doing so through clinical treatment.
In March 2025 the government said it would abolish NHS England, the quango responsible for day-to-day running of the health service. Mr Streeting wants to give greater autonomy to local services, using a smaller centre to set strategy and standards, and reintroduce hospital league tables—copying a model used by Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary.
Mr Streeting's main manifesto pledge is that by 2029 patients should wait no more than 18 weeks for planned hospital treatment. "It's the thing the prime minister holds my feet to the fire on the most," he has said. He compares his ambition to the "same revolutionary approach" as Aneurin Bevan's when founding the NHS.
As a Labour leadership contender from the party's right, he has called for Britain to rejoin the European Union and has previously advocated higher capital-gains tax.
On November 12th 2025 officials in Downing Street accused Mr Streeting of planning to oust Keir Starmer as prime minister. Mr Streeting labelled his accusers conspiracy theorists who were trying to "kneecap" him. He is comfortably the most ambitious cabinet minister and is suspected of preparing a leadership bid, though he denies it. He has been linked to Peter Mandelson and was closer to Lord Mandelson than the prime minister ever was.
The NHS's "voluntary" rebate—which in effect caps how much it will pay each year for drugs—hit 23% in 2025. Mr Streeting refused to budge. Shortly afterwards, high-profile pharmaceutical investments in Britain started being cancelled. A retreat is now likely.
In July 2025 the British Medical Association launched a five-day walkout by resident doctors. Mr Streeting called the strikes "completely unjustified", warning that Labour's pledge to cut waiting lists would almost certainly be broken if they went ahead. Coroners have linked previous BMA strikes to at least five patient deaths.
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.