Health and Social Care Committee — hearing of 8 July 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 00:45

Speaker 2

Welcome to this one-off session of the Health and Social Care Select Committee where we are pleased to welcome our Secretary of State, James Murray. James, thank you so much for being with us today. We've also got, of course, Sam Jones and Jim Mackey, who are well known to this committee, so thank you so much for coming back. So, Minister, if you don't mind, I'm just going to get cracking. Obviously, you're relatively new in post, so it's been a few weeks now, having come from the Treasury.

And this committee spends a lot of time lamenting the fact that we don't think the Treasury fully understands the health and social care landscape. Now that you've gone native, as it were, I hope, what's your perspective on that?

00:45 - 03:00

Speaker 1

Well, firstly, thanks for having me along to the committee this morning, Chair. So I think my perspective, having seen it from both sides, I recognize that the extra investment put into the health service and to social care as a result of the decisions the Chancellor took, has taken in the first two years of government, have been critical to improving performance of the NHS. I think what I would say I saw from both the Treasury side and I now see from the Department for Health and Social Care side is that more money alone, more funding alone, is not the answer for the sustainable health service we want of the future. And when I was on the Treasury side, I was very conscious about the importance of productivity improvements, about reform and modernization, around using digitization opportunities, shifting to prevention, neighborhood health services, all of the shifts that you'll be well aware of. I was very conscious of that from a Treasury point of view.

Coming over to the Secretary of State in the Department for Health and Social Care side of the equation, I feel like that's been even more supercharged within me, in that I feel that we've got, you know, a very strong funding settlement. What we need to do now is make sure the reforms, the modernization, the investment happens to improve services whilst improving productivity and keeping costs under control. So if I just give you one example, with the technology investment which was secured in the SR, that's about 10 billion pounds over three years in various different technology programs. One of those programs, which I went to see the pilot of last week in St George's in South London, is ambient voice technology, where a little microphone which clinicians wear makes automatically AI-generated notes of a conversation between a clinician and a patient. The clinician looks at them and signs them off, so there's still a human eye going over them.

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