Digital and community to take over from hospitals, says Streeting

The NHS 10 year health plan will see digital, remote and neighbourhood care take over much of the role of hospitals, according to health secretary Wes Streeting.

Speaking at the NHS Confed Expo in Manchester on 12 June 2025, Streeting told delegates: “As we deliver the transformational shifts in our 10 year plan, from hospitals to community, analogue to digital, sickness to prevention, it will have radical implications for services.

“Much of what’s done in hospital today will be done on the high street, over the phone or through the app in a decade’s time.

“So if you need to reconfigure services to cut waiting times, modernise and improve productivity, you’ll have my support.”

He stressed that the £10bn investment in NHS technology and digital transformation announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves in the spending review “won’t be raided due to Rachel’s fiscal rules”.

“The really exciting thing about spending review, big capital investment in tech and 50% increase in tech funding, and it’s protected, because what happened under our predecessors is that capital budgets and tech projects were always ready to plug the deficits, and so we were robbing tomorrow to pay for the crisis.

“Today, that stops,” Streeting said.

He spoke about the “record cash investment” in the NHS which will provide an additional £29bn a year by 2028-2029.

“It is objectively a substantial funding settlement that puts wind in our sails, but investment alone isn’t enough.

“As I have consistently argued, there is no fix to the NHS’s problems that simply pours more money into a broken system.

“It is only through the combination of investment and reform that we will succeed in getting the NHS back on its feet and making make it fit for the future.”

Answering a question from the audience about the role of AI and ambient voice technologies in the NHS, Streeting said: “I’m really excited by the impact this [AI] will have in all sorts of ways”.

He added that he had heard anecdotally that some clinicians are “getting ahead of the game and using ambient AI to record notes and things even where their practice or their trust are not yet caught up with them”.

Streeting said that although he didn’t encourage this, it showed that clinicians are not resistant to change and are “crying out for” AI.

“The staff want productivity gains. They don’t want to be sat there scribbling or typing notes.

“They want to be looking at the patient having the conversation.

“I think it [AI] is going to transform everything, to be honest, from data analytic, analysis and analytics, right through to resource allocation, right through to your ability to have your phone by your side and have the conversation first in front of you,” he said.

The NHS 10 year health plan is expected to be published in July 2025.