Streeting praises health staff from overseas and says Reform UK would be ‘disaster’ for NHS – UK politics live

<p>Health secretary is due to speak at the Labour conference after announcing plans for an ‘online hospital’ aimed at cutting waiting times</p><p><strong>Wes Streeting</strong>, the health secretary, has said an NHS organisation was wrong to describe first-cousin marriages as having benefits.</p><p>As the Mail on Sunday <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15140539/NHS-cousin-marriages-risk-birth-defects-women.html">revealed at the weekend</a>, NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme has issued guidance saying, although first-cousin marriage carries an increased risk of children being born with a genetic condition, it offers benefits including “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages (resources, property and inheritance can be consolidated rather than diluted across households)”.</p><p>The first I heard of this was when I saw that report, I asked immediately, ‘What on earth is going on here and what are they playing at?’</p><p>The advice has been taken down but why was it ever there in the first place?</p><p>It would be a disaster.</p><p>There are doctors, nurses, care workers, NHS staff earning less than £60,000 a year, who have come to this country, who have given back, not just through their taxes, but through their service to our country.</p><p>That’s a system that would check your pockets before your pulse. That’s a system that could ask for your credit card before you get your care.</p><p>That’s not a future I think people in this country want. And I think if more people knew about Reform’s policies on the NHS, the less confident they would be.</p><p>When Nigel Farage was asked in the context of that row about paracetamol, and whether or not it posed a risk to pregnant women and their children, despite what all of the medical science and all of our doctors were saying, when