We are bringing this page to a close now, but if you want more on this story, you can click here for our health correspondent Nick Triggle's reporting.

• Back in July, Nick also asked why the NHS wasn't more productive, despite more money and staff
• Why talk of NHS reforms may give you a sense of deja-vu
• And in Wales, First Minister Eluned Morgan says NHS waits will be prioritised over reform

Thank you for joining us. Today's coverage was brought to you by Jacqueline Howard, Mallory Moench, Tinshui Yeung, Lana Lam, Seher Asaf, Paul Gribben, Aoife Walsh and me.

One of the headline takeaways from Lord Darzi's report is the "awful state" of A&E with long waits likely contributing to an extra 14,000 more deaths a year.

More than 100,000 infants waited over six hours last year, the prime minister said earlier, and nearly a tenth of all patients wait 12 hours or more - leading to thousands of avoidable deaths.

Lengthy waits for urgent treatment also contribute to high cancer death rates when compared to other countries and many people with mental health issues wait over a year for care, Starmer said.

So how much have waiting lists increased in recent years?

As this graph shows, the number of people waiting more than a year for hospital treatment has almost doubled from about four million to almost eight million between August 2007 and June 2024.

The number of patients waiting up to 18 weeks has also doubled from about two million to more than four million in the same period.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, who chairs the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), says she welcomes the findings of Lord Darzi's report.

"We're not anticipating major changes in structure, but we are expecting considerable reform in the way we do things," she tells BBC Radio 4's World at One programme.

"As GPs we are absolutely up for it. It's time to reset how we deliver health in our country."

Hawthorne adds that GPs "feel frustrated as they're seeing many patients with chronic illnesses" and the promise of receiving more resources would "really help".

She points out that GPs are leaving the profession faster than they are entering it.

"There have been lots of initiatives for retaining GPs, unfortunately NHS England has been cancelling them and it's all to do with funding," she says.

Image source, EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock

We are now hearing what independent MP Jeremy Corbyn has to say about Lord Darzi's report.

The former Labour leader focuses on the issue of privatisation in the health system. He estimates that since 2012, the NHS “has lost £10 million *every week* to private healthcare profits”.

To save money, he says, the government needs to stop "wasting billions of pounds on private contracts".

“End outsourcing. Reverse privatisation. Restore a publicly-owned NHS for all,” he says on X (formerly Twitter).

Lord Darzi's report details major shortfalls in the NHS in England and has prompted a variety of calls for more funding to help boost health services around the UK.

However, Prime Minister Keir Starmer made clear in a speech earlier that problems in the NHS will not be solved by extra funding alone.

"We can't duck long-term change," he said this morning, adding "this isn't just going to be solved by more money, it's solved by reform."

So let's have a look at how much governments have been spending on health over past decades.

This graph shows that UK health spending has seen an average increase of about 4% per year since the 1950s, according to figures from the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Several charities have been sending us their reaction to this morning's report from Lord Darzi - here is a flavour of what they have been saying:

• The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy says: "Community rehab keeps people out of hospital. The recognition of the growing challenge is very welcome"
• Mental health charity Mind called the report "a dark day for mental health", saying the findings showing people in a mental health crisis being held in rooms constructed for a Victorian asylum are "unsurprising"
• Kidney Care UK says: "A move to bring care closer to home would be welcomed" and that more people with kidney failure could benefit from home dialysis
• While Crohn's and Colitis UK says the report highlights the challenges that "members of our community tell us about every day"

The responses from these charities follow up on two key reforms to the NHS highlighted earlier by Prime Minister Keir Starmer - moving more care from hospitals to communities, and focusing efforts on prevention over sickness.

You can read more here about what the PM said - and what Lord Darzi's report calls for in changes to NHS services in England.

Image source, Reuters

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has been giving his response to the report’s findings and complains that the UK lags behind European neighbours on healthcare investment and staffing.

"Unless the Labour government urgently delivers the funding the NHS needs it will damage healthcare in every part of the UK," he warns.

Lord Darzi's report, Flynn says, "exposes the catastrophic damage that 14 years of Westminster austerity cuts, chronic underfunding and Brexit have done to the NHS."

The SNP wants to see a major funding boost for the NHS at the Budget next month - echoing calls the party made during the general election for more investment in health care around the UK.

He says "you can't recruit more doctors and nurses, or secure better equipment and waiting times, without adequate investment."

For some background on the situation in Scotland, earlier this year a watchdog warned that increased pressure on the NHS was having a direct impact on patient safety and experience.

Audit Scotland also claimed there was no "overall vision" for the future of the health service.

You can read more about its findings here.

Let's quickly recap what was said in Lord Darzi's report and a bit of the reaction.

Earlier this morning, we heard the prime minister describe the report as a "raw and honest assessment" and that the NHS was "broken but not beaten".

Key points that Keir Starmer made included:

• The state of A&E is "devastating, heart-breaking and infuriating", citing nearly a tenth of all patients waiting 12 or more hours, leading to many avoidable deaths
• The 2010s were a "lost decade" for the NHS due to a policy of austerity in that decade
• The UK has become "a sicker society with 2.8m people "economically inactive"
• The NHS must "reform or die" but this doesn't mean more money

Reform will take a long time, Starmer told journalists when pressed for a timeline, with a 10-year plan to be released next spring.

His lines echoed those made earlier by Health Secretary Wes Streeting who says Labour will now "write the prescription" to reform the NHS.

In response, shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins says Labour needs to "move from rhetoric to action" and that the NHS "belongs to all of us".

Elsewhere, the British Medical Association says "without radical action, the NHS won't survive".

There is more on this story here.

Image source, PA Media

The Green Party say it's "hugely disappointing" that Labour is "hooked on reform rather than investment" in its plans to turn around the NHS in England.

Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay says while Lord Darzi's review "pulls no punches" in assessing the NHS in England, Labour is behaving "like a string of previous Conservative and Labour governments".

He says: "Starmer says there can be no money without reform. We say there can be no improvement to waiting times, cancer death rates, treatment for mental health - and many other struggling areas - without more money."

Ramsay suggests that it's "fair to ask the super-rich to pay a little more through wealth taxes" which could generate "billions towards the investment the NHS is crying out for."

Image source, PA Media

Long waiting lists and delays in getting emergency treatment were among the key findings of Lord Darzi's government-commissioned report into the NHS.

Here's a look at latest NHS performance data for England:

• Overall waiting list: The size of the waiting list for routine hospital treatment remained unchanged in July, following three consecutive monthly increases. An estimated 7.62 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of the month
• Long waits for treatment: At the end of July, some 2,738 patients were waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment, up from 2,621 in June
• Accident & emergency waits: In August, 28,494 people waited more than 12 hours in A&E departments from a decision being made to admit to actual admission, the lowest in a year and down from 36,806 in July
• Cancer referrals: 76.2% of urgent cancer referrals in July were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days, down slightly from 76.3% the previous month but above the target of 75%

Is NHS in England better than in Wales?published at 13:20 British Summer Time 12 September

13:20 BST 12 September

By Gerry Georgieva

Earlier today, shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins criticised the Darzi report for not comparing the performance of NHS England to the Labour-run NHS in Wales.

"They have one-in-four of their population on NHS waiting lists, on average a Welsh patient is waiting seven weeks longer than an English patient, and they have 23,000 people waiting longer than two years whereas in England we have 120 people," Atkins said.

It’s difficult to compare NHS in England and Wales because they record their performance differently, external and the Welsh population is older, poorer and sicker.

Secondly, saying one-in-four people are on a waiting list in Wales is problematic because the statistic the claim is based on counts treatments rather than patients. This means a patient could be counted more than once if they’re receiving multiple treatments for different problems. The number of patients on the Welsh waiting lists is 615,300, which is closer to one-in five-people.

On average patients in Wales do wait seven weeks longer for treatment than the ones in England, external - 21.7 weeks, as of June, compared to 14 weeks in England, external.

The Liberal Democrats have cast Lord Darzi's report as the synopsis of the Tories' impact on the NHS.

"Today's report is a scathing summary of the complete devastation that the Conservatives have wrought on our health services and the health of our communities," Lib Dem health spokeswoman Daisy Cooper told the House of Commons earlier.

She adds that her party has long argued that healthcare needs to shift "from hospitals to high street, and from treatment to prevention".

She also criticises the report as being "long on diagnosis, and short on prescription", adding the Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting should read his party's election manifesto for ideas on dentistry, hiring GPs and tackling cancer waiting lists.

Streeting replies saying that both Labour and the Lib Dems have a lot in common in terms of how they view the NHS and adds the government is "absolutely determined both to address the short-term crisis and the long-term needs of the century".

Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins says the NHS "belongs to all of us", as she responded to Lord Darzi's report into the state of the health service in England.

Speaking in Parliament, she urged MPs to talk constructively about the health service's future.

The report in part blamed austerity under the coalition government of the 2010s for issues with the NHS. Atkins says the Conservatives haven’t pretended everything was fixed or that there are easy answers to difficult challenges.

"For the NHS to thrive in its next 75 years it needs to reform, modernise and improve productivity," she adds.

She says the report doesn't include future-looking reforms from the past government, such as creating and working on implementing a long-term workforce plan.

In the last hour, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has spoken in the House of Commons about Lord Darzi's NHS review.

The review reveals the “hard truths, warts and all”, Streeting said.

He told the House children are "sicker today" than a decade ago, and adults are getting ill "earlier in life".

A decade of under investment means the NHS is “15 years behind the private sector on technology”. It has fewer diagnostic scanners per patient than almost every comparable country, including Belgium, Italy and Greece, Streeting added.

Mental health patients being “treated in Victorian buildings with cockroach and mice infestations where 17 men are forced to share two showers in 2024”.

He calls the reforms in 2012 “a calamity without international precedence” and the coronavirus hit the NHS “harder than any other comparable health system in the world”.

It's “over to us now to write the prescription," Streeting said.

What happened to public satisfaction with the NHS?published at 12:08 British Summer Time 12 September

12:08 BST 12 September

By Gerry Georgieva

In his speech, Keir Starmer said that "public satisfaction in the NHS has fallen from an all-time-high when the last Labour government left office to an all-time-low today".

The claim is true, though the methodology changed in 2019.

Public satisfaction is measured regularly in the British Social Attitudes survey, based on over 3,300 responses in 2023., external

In 2010 – when Labour last left office – 70% of the public said they were “very or quite satisfied” with the NHS.

This was the highest at least since records began in 1983.

At 24%, it is currently at its lowest.

During this time, the number of people that said they were dissatisfied also increased to an all-time-high of 52%.

One of the concerns raised about the NHS today is the long waiting time in A&E, as the prime minister highlighted earlier in his speech.

The A&E long waits likely to be causing an additional 14,000 more deaths a year, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

Earlier, we heard from Prof Rob Galloway, emergency medicine consultant at University Hospitals Sussex, who says the problem is that A&E patients aren't placed in wards quickly enough.

He says this is because not enough beds are available, with some occupied by people who are ready to be discharged but can't leave because community care has not been prepared for them.

The NHS has let the “elderly people who have spent their whole lives paying their taxes” down, he adds.

Labour trashes Tories' handling of the NHS – but can Starmer deliver?published at 11:36 British Summer Time 12 September

11:36 BST 12 September

Leila Nathoo
Political correspondent

Lord Darzi’s report today allows Labour to return to its favourite themes – trashing the Tories’ record and promising to fix the foundations of public services.

But Labour will have to set out exactly how their promise of the ‘biggest re-imagining of the NHS since its birth’ would have different consequences from the reforms of 2012, which they claim were catastrophic for the health service.

There is the promise of investment in technology and infrastructure, but it will be tethered to reforms, says the prime minister.

We’ll have to wait for this Autumn’s Budget and the longer term Spending Review to find out how much money there is to back up these plans.

There was little mention of social care though today, despite Lord Darzi identifying that 13% of hospital beds being occupied by people who should be being treated elsewhere.

Starmer talked in vague terms about reaching a cross-party consensus on a National Care Service – but his government will need to come up with a proper plan for the sector if his ambitions for the NHS are going to be realised.

How many of the 40 hospitals were new?published at 11:17 British Summer Time 12 September

11:17 BST 12 September

By Gerry Georgieva

The prime minister accused the Conservatives of not delivering on their promise to build 40 hospitals.

"The last government went on and on and on about 40 new hospitals which sounds great, but they weren't 40, they weren't new", he said in his speech.

In 2020, the previous Conservative government announced that it would build 40 new hospitals in England by 2030.

As well as entirely new builds, the definition of “new” hospitals included clinical buildings or wings at existing sites and refurbishments.

To date, one project out of the 40 has opened – the Dyson Cancer Centre in Bath - with a second due to open in 2025.

Five of the eight earlier projects have also opened, but they do not count towards the 40 hospitals target, external.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said last year that the previous government would not meet its pledge by 2030., external

The new Labour government has committed to delivering the New Hospitals Programme, but it has not said when it will be completed.

Image source, PA Media

The prime minister has just wrapped up his address responding to the report into the NHS by Lord Darzi. Here's a rundown of the key takeaways from his speech:

• The state of the NHS right now is devastating, Starmer said, and people have a right to be angry about it
• The NHS was struggling before the pandemic, with the 2010s a "lost decade" for the service

• Starmer announced a 10-year plan to reform the NHS with three big shifts in store for it
• This involves digitising the health service, moving from hospital care to community care, and lastly, shifting from sickness to preventative care
• Change is going to take a long time – more than one parliamentary term, he warned

• Starmer also said wants to see a new "national care service" as part of social care reform

Starmer faces big question on how he'll pay for NHS improvementpublished at 10:58 British Summer Time 12 September

10:58 BST 12 September

Nick Triggle
Health correspondent

The prime minister has promised big reform for the NHS.

But we will have to wait until next spring before we know just what that will be - that's when a new 10-year plan will be published.

Starmer made it clear there would be:

• investment in digital technologies
• more care in the community
• a bigger focus on prevention

That will require upfront investment – and its not clear where that will come from.

The NHS budget is set for this year, but beyond that it is unclear.

When Tony Blair's Labour government made big strides in reducing waiting lists during the 2000s it was increasing the budget by 7-8% a year.

That is double what was invested during the last Parliament.

And with Starmer ruling out tax rises for "working people" and the NHS now accounting for more than 40p out of every £1 spent on day-to-day public services it is easy to see why those in the health service are wondering how this will be paid for.