What's in the party manifestos on health and care? General election 2024

Prevention, public health and local government funding

Conservative

• Publish and implement a major conditions strategy.  
• Bring forward the Tobacco and Vapes Bill in the first King’s Speech.
• Legislate to restrict the advertising of products high in fat, salt and sugar.
• Gather new evidence on the impact of ultra-processed food.

Labour

• Tackle the social determinants of health, halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions in England.
• A new ambition to raise the healthiest generation of children in our history.
• Ensure the next generation can never legally buy cigarettes and ban vapes from being branded and advertised to appeal to children.
• Ban the advertising of junk food to children and the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s.
• Ensure all hospitals implement ‘opt-out’ smoking cessation interventions.
• Enable vaccinations for babies and children as part of health visits.
• Introduce a supervised toothbrushing scheme for 3- to 5-year-olds, targeting areas of highest need.
• Set a target to close the black and Asian maternal mortality gap.
• Give local councils multi-year funding settlements and end wasteful competitive bidding.

Liberal Democrats

• Establish a ‘Health Creation Unit’ in the Cabinet Office to lead work across government to improve health and tackle health inequalities.
• Help people to spend 5 more years of their life in good health by investing in public health and increasing the public health grant, with targeted funding on areas with the worst health inequalities.
• Introduce a new levy on tobacco company profits to help fund health and smoking cessation services and introduce regulations to halt the use of vapes by children.
• Support local authorities to restrict outdoor advertising of junk food and limit TV advertising to after 9pm.
• Extend the soft drinks levy to juice-based and milk-based drinks that are high in added sugar.
• Introduce a national food strategy.  
• Pass a Clean Air Act overseen by a new Air Quality Agency.  
• Provide supervised toothbrushing training for children in nurseries and schools and scrap VAT on children’s toothbrushes and toothpaste.  
• Tackle the funding crisis facing local authorities, including by providing multi-year funding settlements.

↑ Back to contents

NHS funding and reform

Conservative

• Increase NHS spending above inflation in each year of the next parliament.
• Invest £3.4bn in new technology.
• Deliver the 40 new hospitals programme by 2030 and invest proportionately more in out-of-hospital services over time.
• Protect and promote patients’ right to choose the NHS service that is right for them and grow opportunities for all types of providers to offer services to NHS patients (where they meet NHS costs and standards).
• Create ‘new incentives’ for improved performance.

Labour

• Ensure 40,000 more operations, scans and appointments every week, funded with around £1bn in additional revenue.
• Create a £250m Fit for the Future fund to double the number of CT and MRI scanners.
• Recruit 8,500 new mental health staff with £410m in funding.
• Deliver a dentistry rescue plan, providing 700,000 more urgent dental appointments with £125m in funding.
• Deliver the new hospitals programme.
• Shift resources to primary care and community services over time.

Liberal Democrats

• Increase NHS and social care revenue funding by £8.4bn a year by 2028/29.  
• Deliver a £1.1bn increase in investment in NHS infrastructure and equipment.  
• Implement a 10-year plan to invest in the hospital and primary care estate.

↑ Back to contents

NHS workforce

Conservative

• Implement the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan – increasing nurse numbers by 92,000 and doctor numbers by 28,000 by the end of the next parliament.  
• Reduce the number of managers by 5,500 and consult on a disbarring regime for NHS managers.

Labour

• Publish regular, independent workforce planning across health and social care.
• Deliver the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan, including training thousands more GPs and midwives.
• Recruit 8,500 new mental health staff.
• Implement professional standards and regulations for NHS managers.   
• Establish a Royal College of Clinical Leadership.

Liberal Democrats

• Increase the number of GPs by 8,000, half by boosting recruitment, half by improving retention.
• Recruit more cancer nurses so that every patient has a dedicated specialist nurse.
• Establish an independent pay review body.
• Produce a 10-year plan to improve workforce retention.

↑ Back to contents

Innovation and technology

Conservative

• Remove the NHS budget impact test for new medicines and implement a new med-tech pathway to speed up adoption of cost-effective technologies, including AI, across the NHS.
• Invest £3.4bn to support the implementation of new technology within the NHS.
• Make the NHS App the front door for NHS services.

Labour

• Develop an NHS innovation and adoption strategy and streamline processes for clinical trials.
• Digitise the personal child health record (‘red book’).
• Transform the NHS to put patients in control of their health.

Liberal Democrats

• Ring-fence budgets to support adoption of innovative digital tools.
• Replace old computers and require all IT systems used by the NHS to work with each other.
• Ensure every care setting has electronic records in place that can feed into a patient’s health record.
• Expand virtual wards.

↑ Back to contents

Acute and emergency care

Conservative

• Return performance to the levels set out in the NHS Constitution by the end of the next parliament.  

Labour

• Return to meeting NHS performance standards, with patients to wait no longer than 18 weeks for routine hospital treatment.    
• Deliver an extra 2 million NHS operations, scans and appointments every year (amounting to 40,000 more appointments per week) by incentivising staff to carry out additional appointments out of hours.  
• Pool resources across neighbouring hospitals to introduce shared waiting lists. 
• Use ‘spare capacity’ in the independent sector to bring down waiting lists.

Liberal Democrats

• Increase the number of staffed hospital beds.
• Publish accessible, localised reports of ambulance response times.
• Establish a guarantee that all patients will be able to start cancer treatment within 62 days from urgent referral.

↑ Back to contents

Mental health services

Conservative

• Expand coverage of mental health support teams to all schools/colleges by 2030.
• Create early support hubs for those aged 11–23 in every local community by 2030.
• Increase the planned expansion of NHS talking therapies by 50%.
• Boost capacity of individual placement and support for severe mental illness by 140,000 places.
• Legislate to provide better treatment and support for people with severe mental health needs.
• Ban the use of mobile phones during the school day.

Labour

• Recruit 8,500 new mental health staff across children and adult services.    
• Establish a network of ‘Young Futures Hubs’ to provide open access mental health services for children and young people in every community.  
• Modernise mental health legislation to give patients greater choice, autonomy, enhanced rights and support. 

Liberal Democrats

• Open walk-in hubs for children and young people in every community.
• Place a qualified mental health professional in every school.
• Extend young people’s mental health services to the age of 25.
• End out-of-area mental health placements by increasing capacity and improving coordination.
• Make prescriptions free for people with chronic mental health conditions.
• Create an independent ‘Mental Health Commissioner’ to represent patients, families and carers.

↑ Back to contents

Primary care and community services 

Conservative

• Build or modernise 250 GP surgeries focused in areas of new housing growth.
• Build 50 new community diagnostic centres to provide an additional 2.5 million checks per year.
• Expand Pharmacy First to free up 20 million GP appointments per year.
• Implement the dental recovery plan to unlock 2.5 million more NHS dental appointments and reform the dentistry contract.

Labour

• Move the NHS to a Neighbourhood Health Service, with more care delivered in local communities.
• Guarantee a face-to-face GP appointment for all those who want one and incentivise GPs to see the same patients to encourage continuity of care.
• Establish a Community Pharmacist Prescribing Service, granting more pharmacists independent prescribing rights, and enable other health professionals to make direct referrals to specialists.
• Develop a dentistry rescue plan to provide 700,000 more urgent dental appointments and recruit new dentists to areas most in need. Longer term, reform the dentistry contract.

Liberal Democrats

• Establish a right to see a GP, or most appropriate staff member, within 7 days, or within 24 hours if urgent.
• Give people aged 70 years and older, and those with a long-term health condition, access to a named GP.
• Extend prescribing rights for qualified pharmacists, nurse practitioners and paramedics.
• Establish a Strategic Small Surgeries Fund to sustain services in rural areas.
• Guarantee access to an NHS dentist for those needing urgent and emergency care.
• Introduce an emergency scheme to guarantee access to free NHS dental check-ups for children, new mothers, pregnant women and those on low incomes.
• Review the schedule of exemptions for prescription charges.

↑ Back to contents

Other NHS commitments

Conservative

• Roll out ‘Martha’s rule’ to give patients the right to a second opinion in hospital, pay full compensation to those affected by the infected blood scandal and implement the recommendations of the Cass Review of NHS gender identity services for children and young people.
• Develop and implement a comprehensive national strategy for maternity care and provide additional funding for improved maternal safety and mental and physical health support for new mothers.

Labour

• Implement the recommendations of the Cass Review and act on the findings of the Infected Blood Inquiry.

Liberal Democrats

• Create a Patients’ Charter to harness lived experience and embed patient voices.
• Establish a legal right to a second opinion.
• Implement the recommendations of the Infected Blood Inquiry in full, including with respect to compensation.
• Provide a fair funding deal for hospices.
• Allow parliament a debate and free vote on assisted dying for competent adults who are terminally ill.

↑ Back to contents

Adult social care

Conservative

• Provide local authorities with a multi-year funding settlement to support social care and implement the reforms set out in the People at the heart of care white paper.
• Implement planned reforms to cap social care costs from October 2025.

Labour

• Create a National Care Service, underpinned by national standards and delivering consistency of care across the country.
• Establish a fair pay agreement in adult social care.
• Implement a cap on social care costs from October 2025.ⁱ
• Build consensus for the longer-term reform needed to create a sustainable National Care Service.

Liberal Democrats

• Introduce free personal care based on the model implemented in Scotland and establish a cross-party commission to forge a long-term agreement on sustainable funding for social care.
• Create a national care agency to set national minimum standards of care.
• Develop a social care workforce plan and establish a Royal College of Care Workers to represent the care workforce.
• Create career pathways and increase flexibility for staff to work across NHS and social care services.
• Introduce a carer’s minimum wage, increase the Carer’s Allowance and expand eligibility, and introduce a guarantee of regular respite breaks for unpaid carers and paid carers’ leave.
• Make caring a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010.
• Introduce a young carer’s pupil premium as part of an education guarantee for young carers.

↑ Back to contents

ⁱ Although a commitment to a cap on social care costs does not feature explicitly in the Labour manifesto, a party spokesperson subsequently confirmed this is part of their plans.