Wes Streeting

My hon. Friend, who I am delighted to see representing Bassetlaw, is already showing herself to be an outstanding champion for her community. She raises a really good challenge that we all face as constituency MPs: the public recognise that change takes time and that we cannot fix more than a decade of problems in the immediate future, but they want to know that at least we are hitting the ground running and getting the job done. I can reassure my hon. Friend’s constituents in Bassetlaw that within our first couple of months, this Government employed 1,000 more GPs on the frontline who had been left unemployed by the previous Conservative Government. We did that pretty much immediately. We have settled—I hope; we await the outcome of the ballot—the junior doctors’ dispute, so we can remove the cost of disruption and industrial action and start work on getting the waiting lists down. We will be working at pace to deliver 40,000 more appointments every week so that we can cut waiting lists, and 700,000 urgent emergency dentistry appointments so that we can ensure that people get the care they need. Every single promise in our manifesto, notwithstanding the challenges in the public finances, was a fully costed, fully funded promise that we will keep and that the country can afford.