Labour is demanding an inquiry into revelations that senior civil servants fear the government’s push for a “truly seven-day NHS” may be derailed because it faces staffing and money problems.



Tom Watson, the party’s deputy leader, claimed that leaked Department of Health documents obtained by the Guardian and Channel Four News showed Jeremy Hunt had misled the public by pushing ahead with expanding the NHS in England despite his own mandarins’ concerns.

“Leaked secret papers show that junior doctors’ concerns were right. This warrants an inquiry. Hunt misled the public,” Watson tweeted in response to the disclosures, which have prompted renewed scrutiny of a policy that the Conservatives have pledged to deliver in full by 2020.

Senior Tories have responded to the publication of the department’s own risk assessment of the seven-day plan and other papers by making clear that they share the civil servants’ previously private worries.

Dr Dan Poulter MP – who until last year was a health minister alongside Hunt and is also an NHS doctor – tweeted that the documents constituted “a warning of the dangers of putting soundbites ahead of properly costed and resourced plans for our NHS”.

Dr Sarah Wollaston MP, the ex-GP who chairs the influential Commons health select committee, tweeted: “Cannot keep piling ever greater responsibilities on to an overstretched service without realistic resource and workforce to cope.”

In a swipe at Hunt she added: “Expect problems when thin evidence is used to bolster an under-resourced political objective instead of policy following the evidence.”

Diane Abbott, the shadow health secretary, said: “This is a scandal. The government is undermining the NHS with plans it knew to be unworkable. I will be writing to Jeremy Hunt to ask him to explain why [he] has contravened his civil servants’ advice and to ascertain whether he has misled parliament.”

Prof Jane Dacre, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, also warned that the drive to expand medical services at weekends was unrealistic because of the NHS’s worsening shortage of doctors, which is leading to more and more gaps in rotas and expensive use of locum medics.

“At the moment we are struggling to deliver care over five days, so to extend that to seven days and expect doctors to be able to provide high quality of care is not realistic. Doctors are working hard and they want to do the best they can for patients, but it is difficult to deliver the quality of care needed seven days a week without extra people to deliver it”, she told C4 News.

“There are just not enough doctors available to run a seven-day service at the moment. We all want to provide better patient care but to provide a seven-day service in our hospitals we need more doctors, and probably more nurses too. We also need pharmacists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists working at weekends as well.”

Hunt has made clear he expects the NHS to fund the expansion of services that he wants by 2020 from within the £10bn rise in its budget it will receive by then.

However, health experts such as Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, have made clear that with the £10bn only bringing a 0.9% annual increase in NHS funding, the entire amount will be needed to help the service cope with growing pressures, and it will not cover the costs of having more doctors on duty in hospitals and GP surgeries by the end of this parliament.