Keir Starmer has vowed to repair the devastating damage inflicted on the NHS by years of Tory underfunding and savage cuts. The PM will unveil a 10-year plan for the service after a surgeon’s damning report said wilful neglect and botched reforms have left it on its knees.

Mr Starmer is to say today that the collapse in access to care and the deterioration in the nation's health is “leading to avoidable deaths."

The devastating damage done to our NHS by fourteen years of Tory rule has been laid bare in Lord Darzi’s report: A&E queues have doubled, patients are dying waiting to be seen, access to care has collapsed, staff morale is rock bottom and the nation’s health has deteriorated.

Lord Darzi’s review found the service had been starved of funds and hit by botched Tory reforms. And Keir Starmer vowed to clean up the mess within a decade as he lays into the last government’s endless cuts that left the NHS ­struggling to cope with Covid.

In a speech today, the PM will brand the damage “unforgivable” and say: “People have every right to be angry. It’s not just because the NHS is so personal to all of us, it’s because some of these failings are life and death. Take A&E waiting times. That’s not just a source of fear and anxiety. It’s leading to avoidable deaths. People’s loved ones who could have been saved. Doctors and nurses whose whole vocation is to save them, hampered from doing so. It’s devastating.”

Mr Starmer pledged to launch the “biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth” in 1948. Surgeon and independent peer Lord Darzi said: “Although I have worked for the NHS for more than 30 years I have been shocked by what I found in this investigation. Not just in the health service but in the state of the nation’s health. We want to deliver high-quality care for all but far too many people are waiting too long and in too many clinical areas quality of care has gone backwards.”

“My colleagues in the NHS are working harder than ever but our productivity has fallen. We get caught up frantically trying to find beds that have been axed or using IT that is outdated or trying to work out how to get things done because operational processes are overwhelmed. It sucks the joy from our work. We became clinicians to help patients get better, not to go into battle with a broken system.”

His 160-page report was compiled in the first eight weeks of the Labour government and examined 600 documents and pieces of analysis. It outlines how a collapse in capital spending on NHS buildings and equipment such as scanners has wrecked productivity. Overall, annual spending rises in the past decade were at their slowest growth since the NHS was founded in 1948.

It said some areas of care, such as heart health, have gone backwards for the first time in 50 years. The report also blames the hated 2012 Health and Social Care Act – ­spearheaded by then-Health ­Secretary Andrew Lansley – which it says caused “lasting damage”.

It fragmented the NHS while ushering in the private sector and an era of “competition”, rather than collaboration, between bodies. Lord Darzi added: “In the last 15 years the NHS was hit by three shocks… austerity and starvation of investment, confusion caused by top-down reorganisation, and then the pandemic which came when resilience was at an all-time low. Two out of three of those shocks were choices made in Westminster.”

Mr Starmer will describe the 2012 Tory reform as “a calamity without international precedent”, adding: “Our NHS went into the pandemic in a much more fragile state. We had higher bed-occupancy rates, fewer doctors, fewer nurses and fewer beds than most other high income health systems in the world. The 2010s were a lost decade for our NHS… which left it unable to be there for patients today, and totally unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.”

On top of the blunders that left the NHS unable to meet the challenges of a global pandemic, the Tories also went into lockdown too late, costing thousands of lives, blew billions of pounds on useless PPE and opened Nightingale hospitals that were never used. They also held unlawful parties in Downing St as people died.

Lord Darzi, 64, got the nickname “Robo Doc” for spearheading keyhole surgery and robotics in operations. He was made a health minister by Gordon Brown as an expert outsider in his “government of all the talents” and served from 2007 to 2009. The Tories have sought to use this connection to challenge the ­independence of his report.

Shadow Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said: “We Conservatives recognise that investment has to be married with reform. This is why we brought forward long-term plans for productivity, tech, Pharmacy First, virtual wards, attracting pharmaceutical research and training and retaining staff. We did this whilst boosting ­investment in the NHS in real terms every single year.”

Here are the main findings from Lord Darzi's damning report:

NHS progress is going backwards for the first time in half a century, due largely to management of heart health. Cardio diagnoses and operations are delayed while rapid access to emergency treatment has deteriorated. The time for the highest-risk heart attack patients to have an artery unblocked has risen by 28% from an average of 114 minutes in 2013/14 to 146 minutes in 2022/ 23.

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act caused “lasting damage” and took 10 years for the health service to return to a level of normality. The reforms were introudced by Andrew Lansley when he was Health Secretary. They split the NHS, bringing in the private sector and “competition” between public health bodies. The Darzi review found it was “without international precedent”.

The health of the nation has deteriorated significantly in the past decade, with more people living with multiple long-term conditions. Children’s health has worsened over the past 10 years, an issue that is intrinsically linked to severe delays in accessing care. Some 800,000 children and young people are currently on NHS waiting lists for hospital treatment.

While all cancer survival rates have got better, due in large part to medical advances, that rate of improvement was found to have slowed substantially during the 2010s. The UK has higher cancer mortality rates than comparable countries. And no progress whatsoever was made in diagnosing cancer at stage 1 and 2 between 2013 and 2021, Lord Darzi’s report also notes.

Misery of delays in being seeing at A&E

The report said the 2010s were the most austere decade since the NHS was founded in 1948. Annual spending rises were 1% on average, compared to an average of 3.5% since the NHS was founded. This meant hospitals all-but halted investment in buildings, IT systems and machines such as scanners, to prioritise day-to- day running costs. This caused productivity in the NHS to plummet.

The NHS is behind almost all other comparable nations for IT systems and going from paper records to digital. It is 15 years behind the private sector in its use of tech, and the outdated IT systems add to doctors’ workloads. The report said: “The NHS remains in the foothills of digital transformation. Indeed, the last decade was a missed opportunity to prepare the NHS for the future.”

Lack of capacity and resources after austerity meant the UK cancelled more routine operations than any other comparable country. The Covid inquiry has heard medics had to refuse patients who needed “moderately high risk” yet lifesaving surgery. Over the phone, one hospital doctor told a patient with a bowel perforation they were going to die because they could not be offered an operation.