Shadow Health Secretary Damian Hinds, addresses Conservative Party Conference 2026

Today, Damian Hinds MP, Shadow Health Secretary, delivered his speech at Conservative Party Conference 2026.

Please see the full text of the speech below:

Checked against delivery

As someone who cares very deeply and passionately about Health and Care and as the son of a pharmacist and a dental nurse it is a great honour and privilege and a big responsibility to take on that role.

I also want to mention the role of Stuart Andrew who had been doing this job and the amazing work that he did and as a great champion for these vital sectors.

I'm also very privilege, too, to be joining an amazing shadow team. Three quarters of the team are here. Not only a very talented team but also an extraordinarily experienced team.

Our minister of the Lords is Lord Syed Kamall who is an academic and former Minister for health technology and innovation.

Greg Stafford who spent 17 years' experience working across senior NHS leadership and pharmaceuticals.

Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst a former Army Medical Officer, NHS trauma surgeon and healthcare barrister.

And Dr Caroline Johnson with more than two decades' frontline NHS service as a consultant paediatrician.

They're not the only ones in the parliamentary Conservative party who know healthcare they're joined by:

Dr Luke Evans who used to me in our team who is a former GP.

Dr Ben Spencer, consultant psychiatrist.

Dr Kieran Mullan a former A&E doctor.

If anybody tries to tell you that Labour is the party of the NHS.
You can say I really don't think so.

These are the most vital of public services and one we all rely on in our times of greatest need for us, our children and our parents.

I know you will want to join me in paying tribute to and thanking the extraordinary men & women who staff these services devote their lives to it, those who work in the National Health Service and in our social care. Thank you.

When the NHS was founded back in 1948, they had this concept called the backlog of cases and once those cases that hadn't been treated dealt with. Demands on the NHS would ease off.

Well clearly that didn't happen.

Amazing things have happened since 1948, in our country as in others as well. 

Infant mortality is down by 90%.

There are many diseases that used to routinely kill people that now do no.

And on life expectancy we will now on average 12 or 13 years longer.

That extra longevity is very, very welcome, but it also brings issues of its own. 

Though we now have far, far fewer people dying of TB, measles, polio. There are far more living with chronic conditions, often multiple chronic conditions into old age.  And there are more treatments and often they are costlier.

Of course funding for the NHS is always a topic of intense political debate.  As Jim said we spend 11% of GDP on healthcare, that is comparable to Canada, Australia, France or Japan.  And it's not just that a lot more than it was in 1948 even compared to 1990 real spending per head is double or more than it was then.

Yet those intense pressures are still there.

It's because I think largely you're dealing with a demand ineffectively infinite demand for more and better healthcare but coming up against the finite capacity of our human resource.

The wonderful thing of what we've heard from our panel is that those ultimate constraints don't ever go away but they are going to get moved by this technology. Our clinicians, our medial professions are going to be able to do more on behalf of patients.

I think that is an incredibly exciting time, I think it is doubly exciting for us in Britain. Because if we are savvy about it we can do better than most about making the most of these tools. Because of our world leading universities. Because of our life sciences and our leading tech sector. And possibly above all, as Caroline was saying, because we have this one integrated National Health Service with a vast amount of longitudinal data to learn from.

We have just heard from some of awesome potential of these new technologies. Now only about AI of course but centred on AI.

How at Moorfields, diagnostics are being accelerated for people who otherwise could be at risk of losing their sight.

How Generative AI is short-circuiting the design and then testing of drugs and really shortening those cycles.

Personalised medicine and this is sort of the ultimate, where based on genomic understanding of individual people, you can predict, never perfectly, better what may happen with that person and then better diagnose the treatment specifically. 

Tools like AI Scribe the simplest end of what AI can do, but one of the most effective things. By taking away this admin task that can literally take your eye off the person in front of you. Enabling you to spend more time as a doctor with your patients.

Tech-enabled system delivery will help more people to live at home for longer and are more in control of their own care and their own lives.

All of these things are about speeding up processes, improving systems work. Not because the technology in itself is something worth having, but because it lets us do something to better look after the people in their care.

There are also risks in AI deployment and technology and we heard about some of them there.  Big government IT projects are not the public sector's strong suit.  Labour ministers will be haunted by memories of Tony Blair's big project called NHS National Programme for IT, poorly designed without properly involving people working on the frontline and finally was abandoned £10bn later.

Labour ministers will be haunted too by those by the 2 slippery discs do you remember them, the 2 CD-ROMS that were lost with the entire Child Benefit database, bank details and all which were literally lost. And that was without the internet, let alone cyber-hackers trying to test our systems daily.

But these are not things to deter us these are things to make sure that we deal with them with the determination they need.

Innovation is going to happen, you heard about some of the innovation happening in different parts of the world. We need to make sure, the British government needs to make sure that we make it right for this country and for patients in particular.

Part of the bigger challenge is not whether the technology exists or whether you can find it. It is whether as an organisation you are then able to properly deploy. Part of that is about the basic kit systems, the hardware that you have in place.

But there is a bigger factor about cultural acceptance of change and willingness to change working practice. To be fair that is true in just about every sector and organisation. But it becomes a magnified question in an organisation as large and complex as the NHS.

The same time as we as a shadow team holding this government to account. We are also going to be building our Conservative prospectus to put to people come the next election. All of this brilliant team specialising in different areas:

Caroline on hospital care, major conditions, and overall effectiveness of NHS.

Greg on primary care, public health and the crucial role of work.

Neil on mental health, childhood and old people, and adult social care together with Lord Kamall who also leads on the life sciences sector and research.

But technology is in all of their portfolios, because the sort of technology we've been hearing about is relevant in all those areas and we can do better.

So we are going to be doing work, alongside holding the government to account, but to work out the best set of principles. Hearing from experts, clinicians and those leading in the tech field. What do we need to do to make sure this technology works best for patients, fr people including enabling more staff.

Sometimes technology can get a bad rap in the health service as it does in the education, because it can be associated by frontline staff with more work rather than less. We need to make sure it is not working that way and it is enhancing patient time.

We believe it is right to partner between the public sector and the private and independent sector and not for profit sector. And to look around the world for the leaders in these technologies including in data analysis technologies to make sure we are working with the best for the best advantage of people here.

Of course patient safety is the absolute priority and data security and people's privacy go right along with that.

As I said this technology is not an end in itself. But it offers remarkable opportunities.

We as a country have a choice.

You can decide to be what they call a second mover, you can say let's see what happens in other countries around the world and then maybe we'll adopt it later. Or you can say actually we are extraordinarily well placed because of our higher education, because of our life sciences sector, because of our tech sector.

And crucially because of the fantastic assets we have in with our National Health Service that we go and seize this opportunity with both hands.

I want to thank again this panel for telling us about these opportunities. 

And thank you for coming here to hear about it.