Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he will have to take tough decisions after the Conservatives left parts of the system “broken”, including the NHS and prisons. He denied suggestions that the situation was a prelude for unannounced tax decisions but warned that change can’t be delivered overnight. Sir Keir said the work has started and will be delivered as “quickly as we can” in early months and years of government.
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00:00We're going to have to take the tough decisions and take them early, and we will.
00:05We will do that with a raw honesty, and that's really what sat behind Wes Streeting's description
00:11yesterday of the NHS as being broken.
00:14It is.
00:15Everybody who uses it and works in it knows that it is broken, and we're not going to
00:19operate under the pretense or language that doesn't express the problem as it is, because
00:24otherwise we won't be able to fix the problem as quickly as we need to.
00:28And we'll continue in that vein.
00:30There are other issues.
00:31Prisons would be an obvious example where other parts of the system are broken, and
00:35we're going to have to approach that with a raw honesty as well, and we will take the
00:40tough decisions.
00:42But that is not a sort of prelude to saying there's some tax decision that we didn't speak
00:49about before we're about to announce now.
00:51It's about the tough decisions to fix the problem of being honest about what they are.
00:55The work has started, and we will deliver change as quickly as we can, and that will
00:59include change within the early months and years of the government.
01:03It won't be a question of simply saying nothing's going to change until towards the end of the
01:08first term, but different change will be delivered at different speeds, inevitably.
01:14What I can't pretend is that we can fix everything overnight.
01:17The obvious example of that is the mess the last government made in relation to prisons.
01:24They mismanaged the building programme, half the money hasn't been spent, the tough decisions
01:28weren't taken on planning, we don't have the prisons we need, and I can't build a prison
01:33in 24 hours.
01:34But we can get to grips with the planning aspect of that straight away.
01:38We can push on.
01:39Half the money has not been spent, and we will do that straight away, but it will take time.