BRITISH Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, has resigned from his post in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government on 14th May.
In his resignation letter, published today on X, he said he has “lost confidence” in Starmer’s leadership: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”
This comes amid mounting pressures on Starmer to resign, following significant Labour party losses in last week’s local elections.
NHS Hits 18-Week Target Amid Resignation
NHS England today reported that, in March 2026, 65.3% of patients were waiting 18 weeks for NHS treatment, as the waiting list fell by over 312,000 last year, the largest year-on-year reduction in 16 years.
It follows that in March, compared with July 2024, 450,000 fewer people were waiting more than 18 weeks for NHS treatment.
The overall waiting list also fell to 7.11 million, the lowest in 3.5 years and down by over half a million since July 2024.
On the NHS, Streeting wrote to the Prime Minister: “The National Health Service is the embodiment of all that is best about Britain and our values.”
The former British Health Secretary added: “Ambulance response times for heart attacks and strokes are now the fastest in five years.
“A&E waiting times are improving, with four-hour waiting figures also the best in five years.
“We’ve recruited 2,000 more GPs and satisfaction has risen from 60 per cent to 74.5 per cent since we came to office.
“We hit our target of recruiting 8,500 mental health staff three years early.
“We’ve achieved this at the same as balancing the books for the first time in nine years and smashing the 2 per cent NHS productivity target by achieving 2.8 per cent, which means the investment we’re putting in goes further and that the public can have greater confidence that their money is being well-spent.”
Featured image: Wesley Streeting ©House of Commons, licenced under CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
