Wes Streeting today unveiled an NHS plan to tackle some of the country’s worst performing hospitals.

The Health Secretary gave a speech at the University of East London on the day landmark polling suggested Labour are starting to turn the NHS around after a decade of decline under the Tories. A new NHS Intensive Recovery programme has identified hospital trusts with longer waits and worse care and will send in crack leadership teams to turn them around from next month. The new strategy will see leaders sacked and some organisations merged.

Mr Streeting said: “Right now, a cluster of high-performing Trusts are masking some chronic under-performance in other parts of the country. Failure has been tolerated for too long. Staff know it. Patients feel it. And I won’t stand for it.

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“We won’t have succeeded in changing the NHS, until we change it for the patients who are suffering the worst services in the country. In some places, so many years of poor service without improvement is feeding that sense of fatalism. They believe that after so long, it just can’t get better – in fact, they've never seen it get better.

“That’s why I’ve announced today a new Intensive Recovery programme. This will target the worst performing providers, sending in our best leaders or delivering the structural changes necessary to get them back on track. No more turning a blind eye to failure.”

The first wave of Trusts facing measures will include: North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust and East Kent Hospitals NHS Trust.

The first full year of the Labour government in 2025 saw the greatest fall in dissatisfaction in the NHS in over a quarter of a century - since New Labour’s first full year in power in 1998.

The British Social Attitudes survey has been carried out every year for over 40 years and is considered the gold standard assessment of how the public experience health and care in this country. The annual poll of 3,400 people from England, Scotland and Wales published on Wednesday also showed dissatisfaction is still at historically high levels, particularly for A&Es and dentistry.

In his speech Mr Streeting warned about the future of the NHS if Reform UK win the next General Election. He said: " Nigel Farage says he wants an insurance-based system, he says when it comes to the future of the NHS he's up for anything, and I believe him.

"Reform now run like a mile away from things they've said on this because they know that they don't believe in the NHS; they don't believe in an NHS that is owned by us to be there for all of us; they don't believe in an NHS that means that whenever you fall ill, you never have to worry about the bill.

"But the British people do… there are still lots of people in this country who are considering Reform, but if they knew what Nigel Farage really thinks about the NHS and its future, they wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole.”