Labour conference special: does your Labour MP stand by their election manifesto pledge?

29 Sep 2025

By 26 November the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will have decided how NHS reforms outlined in the government’s 10 Year Health Plan will be funded. We’ve been at Labour conference in Liverpool this week to sound out how MPs and party members feel about that. You can read more about it in this article from the Daily Mirror.

We believe that a new round of Public Private Partnership finance arrangements - which is up for consideration, and which could include PFIs - will be a disaster for the NHS.

Thousands of We Own It supporters feel the same way. They have written more than 10,000 letters to their local MPs, urging them not to allow the private sector to gain more of a stranglehold on our NHS.

So how have their parliamentary representatives responded? At the time of writing 30 Labour MPs - and counting - have signed our “2024 Manifesto" board; a show of support for their party’s manifesto pledge that our NHS will always be publicly owned and funded.

Labour MPs
Apsana Begum
Abtisam Mohamed
Andy McDonald
Barry Gardiner
Bell Ribeiro-Addy
Cat Eccles
Cat Smith
Charlotte Nichols
Chris Hinchliff
Dawn Butler
Emma Lewell
Graham Stringer
Grahame Morris
Ian Byrne
Ian Lavery
⁠Imran Hussain
Jon Trickett
John McDonnell
Kate Osamor
Kate Osborne
Kim Johnson
Mary Kelly Foy
Matt Bishop
Nadia Whittome
Olivia Blake
Paula Barker
Rebecca Long-Bailey
Richard Burgon
Rosena Allin-Khan
Simon Opher
Steve Witherden

Independent MPs
Neil Duncan-Jordan
Rachael Maskell
Brian Leishman

Labour Peers
Lord Prem Sikka
Lord Tony Woodley

Labour swept to power on the back of that manifesto. It promised - in bold, bright red capital letters - CHANGE. Instead, what Rachel Reeves and Health Minister Wes Streeting are threatening is more of the same; private finance contracts which have left many NHS Trusts with eye-watering levels of debt. The research we carried out last year revealed that on the average PFI project, NHS trusts have already paid back over three and half times what was borrowed, but they still owe £605 million on average or £44 billion across all 80 PFI-laden trusts.

The 2024 Labour Party General Election manifesto promised that “with Labour, the NHS will always be publicly owned and publicly funded”. But in the 2025 10 Year Health Plan they propose to "develop a business case for the use of Public Private Partnership (PPP) for Neighbourhood Health Centres".

So they are looking to reopen the door of our NHS to private finance. As The Guardian reported ahead of conference season, they’ve already shelled out millions to management consultants Deloitte to advise them on how this could be done.

We say: no more. The NHS can’t handle it. This is a level of debt that will paralyse our beloved health service for decades.

Getting Labour MPs to say they still stand by their manifesto promise is huge - it challenges what the government wants to do. Is your MP one of them?

If you have a Labour MP and their name doesn’t appear, then you can take action. Write to your MP, or to Rachel Reeves. Demand that Labour keeps to its promise. It only takes 5 minutes.