General election 2024: the health and care manifesto pledges

From October 2025, implement planned reforms to cap the social care costs an individual is liable to pay.

Take forward the reforms in the ‘People at the Heart of Care’ White Paper.

Undertake a programme of reform to create a National Care Service.

New national standards for adult social care to ensure consistency of care across England, with a principle of ‘home first’.

Develop local partnership working between the NHS and social care sector on hospital discharge.

Task regulators with addressing the role social care workers can play in basic health treatment and monitoring.

Introduce free personal care so that some aspects of a person’s care costs are covered by the state.

Create a National Care Agency to set national minimum standards of care.

Establish a cross-party commission to forge a long-term agreement on sustainable funding for social care.

Build 50 more community diagnostic centres.

Build or modernise 250 GP surgeries, focusing on areas with new housing growth.

Expand Pharmacy First (which enables people to refer themselves, or be referred by NHS 111, GPs and others, to pharmacies for minor illnesses or urgent repeat medicine supplies) to cover menopause support, contraception and treatment for chest infections.

Invest proportionately more in out-of-hospital services over time.

Train thousands more GPs and guarantee a face-to-face appointment for everyone that wants one.

Deliver a modern appointment-booking system.

Bring back ‘the family doctor’ by incentivising GPs to ensure people always see the same GP.

Create a ‘community pharmacist prescribing service’, granting more pharmacists independent prescribing rights where appropriate.

Allow other professionals, such as opticians, to make direct referrals to specialist services or tests, and expand self-referral routes where appropriate.

Trial ‘neighbourhood health centres’, bringing together existing community services such as family doctors, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists, palliative care specialists and mental health specialists under one roof.

Move to a ‘neighbourhood health service’ with more care delivered in local communities, shifting resources to primary care and community services over time.

Give everyone the legal right to see a GP within seven days, or 24 hours if in urgent need.

Give everyone over 70 and everyone with long-term health conditions access to a named GP.

Establish a 'strategic small surgeries fund’ to sustain services in rural and remote areas.

Introduce a universal 24/7 GP booking system.

Work towards a fairer and more sustainable long-term funding model for pharmacies.

Build on the Pharmacy First approach to give people more accessible routine services and ease the pressure on GPs.

Greater prescribing rights and public health advisory services will be given to qualified pharmacists, nurse practitioners and paramedics in order to free up more time for GPs.

Increase NHS spending above inflation in each year of the next parliament.

£1.7 billion a year by 2029/30 to fund the expansion of Pharmacy First, GP surgeries and community diagnostic centres and mental health services.

£1 billion to fund 40,000 more operations, scans and appointments every week.

£125 million dentistry package including 700,000 urgent appointments every year.

£410 million to recruit 8,500 new mental health staff.

An extra £3.7 billion a year by 2028/29 in day-to-day NHS spending (which includes the funding to improve access to planned and emergency hospital care)¹.

At the next Spending Review, give local authorities a multi-year funding settlement to support social care.

Give local authorities multi-year funding settlements.

Spend an extra £3.7 billion a year on social care².

Improve working conditions for all NHS staff.

Consider the implications of the review of the whistleblowing framework for the NHS.

Consult on a disbarring regime for NHS managers.

Reset relations with NHS staff and move away from the current approach on strikes.

Implement professional standards and regulation for NHS managers.

Establish a royal college of clinical leadership to ‘champion the voice of clinicians’.

Implement a 10-year retention plan for NHS staff.

Make flexible working in the NHS a day-one right and expand access to flexible, affordable childcare.

Introduce ‘truly’ independent complaints processes and transparent monitoring of reports of sexual misconduct in the NHS.

Create a career ladder to allow flexibility to work across the NHS and social care.

Create a royal college of care workers to represent the care workforce.

Bring forward the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

Publish and implement a major conditions strategy.

Legislate to restrict the advertising of food products high in fat, salt and sugar.

Gather new evidence on the impact of ultra-processed foods.

Roll out new digital health checks to 250,000 more people every year.

Expand HIV opt-out testing in emergency departments in England as part of the HIV Action Plan.

Ensure the next generation can never legally buy cigarettes.

Ensure all hospitals integrate ‘opt-out’ smoking cessation interventions into routine care.

Ban vapes from being branded and advertised to appeal to children.

Ban sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s.

Ban on junk food ads on television before 9pm.

Introduce a supervised tooth-brushing scheme for three to five-year-olds, targeting the areas of highest need.

Halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions in England.

Commission a new HIV action plan in England, in pursuit of ending HIV cases by 2030.

Introduce regulations to halt the use of vapes by children and ban the use of single-use vapes.

Introduce a new levy on tobacco company profits to help fund health care and smoking cessation services.

Improve access to blood pressure tests in community spaces.

Expand social prescribing and investment in community projects.

Protect children from exposure to junk food by restricting outdoor advertising and restricting TV advertising to after 9pm.

Extend the soft drinks levy to juice-based and milk-based drinks that are high in added sugar.

Tackle air pollution and poor air quality in public buildings with a clean air Act.

Prevent tooth decay by providing supervised toothbrushing training for children in nurseries and schools, and scrapping VAT on children’s toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Establish a ‘health creation unit’ in the Cabinet Office to lead work across government to improve the nation’s health and tackle health inequalities.

Increase the Public Health Grant (paid to local authorities to provide preventive services to improve health) by £1 billion per year, with a proportion of extra funding set aside for those experiencing the worst health inequalities.

Publish and implement a major conditions strategy, to prevent conditions such as cancer from occurring and ensure people living with such conditions receive the best possible care.

Double the number of MRI and CT scanners in the NHS.

Introduce a guarantee that 100% of cancer patients will be able to start treatment within 62 days of an urgent referral.

Pass a cancer survival research Act to co-ordinate and ensure funding for cancers with the lowest survival rates.

Launch a new prostate cancer screening programme for people at higher risk.

Replace ageing radiotherapy machines and increase their number.

Halve the time for new treatments to reach patients.

Recruit more cancer nurses so that every patient has a dedicated specialist supporting them.

Support research into new treatments, including for Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.

Secure more commercial clinical trials.

Remove the NHS Budget Impact Test and align NHS England’s cost-effectiveness thresholds for new medicines indications with those used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

Implement a new medtech pathway so that cost-effective medical technology, including AI, is rapidly adopted throughout the NHS.

Take forward the rare diseases action plan.

Develop an NHS innovation and adoption strategy in England, to include a plan for procurement and reform of incentive structures and faster regulatory approval for new technology and medicines.

Give more people the chance to participate in clinical trials through the NHS app.

Put Britain at the forefront of transforming treatment for dementia.

Improve faster access to new and novel medicines and medical devices by seeking a comprehensive mutual recognition agreement with the European Medicines Agency.

Pay comprehensive compensation to those infected and those affected by the infected blood scandal, accepting the principles recommended by the inquiry, and give a further £210,000 interim payment to living infected beneficiaries.

Roll out Martha’s Rule, giving patients the right to a second opinion.

Complete the implementation of the Cass review.

Amend the NHS Constitution to recognise the right to request single-sex accommodation and same-sex intimate care, including ensuring the words ‘woman’ and ‘breastfeeding’ are not replaced.

Update the NHS Constitution to reflect the bespoke health care needs of rural and coastal communities.

Implement the recommendations of the Cass review.

Act on the findings of the Infected Blood Inquiry.

Enable vaccinations for babies and children as part of health visits.

Implement the recommendations of the Infected Blood Inquiry in full, including delivering full and fair compensation to all victims of the scandal in a timely and transparent manner.

Provide a fair funding deal for hospices, including children’s hospices.

Create a new ‘patients’ charter’ to harness lived experience of patients and embed patient voice, partnership and safety standards across health and care settings.