Professor Lord Winston ‘not optimistic’ about the NHS as leaders debate future
Labour peer and professor Lord Winston has admitted he is “not optimistic” about the future of the NHS as the health service celebrates its 75th anniversary.
The distinguished professor said he did not believe enough money was being spent organising how the NHS is run and that “national poverty” was undermining the delivery of the health service.
“We’ve got the largest employer, perhaps in the world…and the amount of money spent on the administration is absolutely insignificant,” he told Sky News presenter Mark Austin.
“And actually, the need to administer that far more effectively is really clear – it doesn’t matter whether that is in the health service or general practice or certainly in social care, but I think that’s one thing we need to keep in mind.”
Lord Winston, who is one of Britain’s leading medical experts on the study of fertility, said an increase in funding for primary care in recent years had “not actually helped the health service that much” because the key issue was “national poverty”, which he described as a “massive problem in Britain”.
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“We are a poor country because we’ve not managed our finances,” he said, adding that poverty had also had a knock-on effect on education and the environment.
The Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London appeared alongside Dame Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, who also said the NHS was picking up wider problems in society.
“Over the last 10-15 years we have seen social determinants of health get worse – green spaces, homelessness, poor housing, poor nutrition – and the NHS is picking up those issues,” she said.
“We’ve also seen our economy go down.
“It’s very complex. If you are saying to me should the NHS change, then yes of course it should change.
“We need to be delivering much more care – in primary care, in general practice and in the community.”
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Lord Winston ‘not optimistic on NHS’
Dame Clare said that unless there were three major shifts – in prevention, personalised care and shifting resources in primary care, “then I do fear for the future of the NHS”.
Lord Winston and Dame Clare made the remarks in a special programme by Sky News to mark the 75th anniversary, asking the central question: can we mend the NHS?
As well as Lord Winston, other NHS experts have cast doubt over the future of the health service.
In a speech to mark the anniversary of its creation, Amanda Pritchard, the head of the NHS in England, warned the service faced a future of “enormous challenges” as a “cornerstone of national life” in Britain.
She said its staff were battling a combination of COVID backlogs and record demand for services – challenges that workers were ready to meet “head on”.
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The state of the NHS explained
Meanwhile, other experts warned that the NHS – created in July 1948 – may not reach its 100th birthday without more resources and fundamental reforms.
The warning, by three leading thinktanks – the King’s Fund, the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust – blamed short-term policymaking and a decade of underinvestment, which they said had left the NHS in a “critical condition”.
Separately, NHS Providers – which represents hospital trusts – warned of “enormous pressures” amid a record rise in demand for care and “the biggest financial squeeze in its history”.
Last week, Rishi Sunak unveiled the NHS workforce plan, which would see £2.4bn funnelled into solving the severe staffing crisis in NHS England.
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NHS in ‘critical condition’ at 75 years
Ministers are also aiming to more than halve the number of NHS staff being recruited from abroad in the next 15 years, in order to train more NHS staff domestically to “reduce reliance on international recruitment and agency staff”.
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Staffing vacancies currently stand at 112,000, with fears shortfalls could grow to 360,000 by 2037.
The additional funding will help train “record numbers of doctors, nurses, dentists, and other healthcare staff” in England, with plans to employ 300,000 extra staff in the coming years. The funding works out at approximately £21,000 per vacancy.
Asked about the NHS workforce plan announced by the prime minister last week, Lord Winston warned it will take at least a decade to have an impact, especially because the NHS was “losing people all the time” due to disenchantment and early retirement.
“That’s an issue which the government has failed completely to tackle,” he said.
Elon Musk could be on track for a $1trn pay packet.
Tesla shareholders have approved the whopping financial package for the CEO – who’s already worth an estimated $491bn – if he hits a series of ambitious targets over the next 10 years.
But that $1trn figure (or £761,910,000,000) – which is both one thousand billion and one million million – is almost impossible to imagine for most people.
Even so, we have drilled down into the numbers and examined what you can do with a trillion US dollars – and it turns out, quite a lot.
Show me the money
Laid end to end, a trillion one-dollar bills would cover a distance of approximately 156 billion metres.
That could wrap around the equator 3,890 times, easily reach the sun from Earth (around 149.6 million km) or loop from Earth to the moon 405 times.
That many one-dollar notes could cover a massive area (roughly 10,339 km squared), meaning you could blanket nearly all of Lebanon or Jamaica in bills.
Spend it on sport
You could splash out on virtually all of the world’s major sporting leagues.
The clubs which make up the Premier League are relatively cheap ($30bn), and even when snapping up the UEFA Champions League clubs and the big five top divisions of Spain, Italy, Germany, and France, there’s still $858bn left in the kitty.
The four major US sports leagues for ice hockey, baseball, basketball, and American football (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) have a rough valuation of $544bn, according to Sportico.
But then add the IPL cricket league ($120bn) and F1 ($23.1bn) and Musk still has change from an estimated total spend of $829.7bn.
Elon Musk is in the money if he hits targets set by Tesla’s shareholders. File pic: AP
Take over Tesla’s rivals
He could buy up the top 15 largest publicly traded automakers (excluding Tesla) by market capitalisation.
They would include firms like Japan’s Toyota ($275bn), Chinese automaker BYD ($120bn), and luxury brands like Ferrari ($81bn) and Mercedes-Benz ($62bn), as well as BMW ($52bn), Volkswagen ($50bn) and Ford ($48bn).
But there would still be a little change left over; the total bill would be an eye-watering $992bn.
Buy up San Diego
He could buy up every single residential property in San Diego County – valued at a total of $1trn. Seattle is just slightly out of reach at $1.1trn, according to recent data from real estate firm Zillow.
But if he wanted to buy big – there is always Tennessee. The total value of homes in the US state is estimated at $957bn. Or there is Maryland, which at $1.01trn could be bought if he can find a little more cash behind the sofa.
Sadly, he would struggle to scoop up London’s entire housing stock, which in February was valued at just under £2trn ($2.53trn), according to agents Savills.
Cities like New York ($4.6trn) and Los Angeles ($3.9trn) are also not within his budget, hosting America’s most expensive residential markets.
Do something charitable?
There is always the possibility Musk could follow in the footsteps of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.
He could give every single man, woman, and child in the US a share of his cash pile. They would receive approximately $2,917.32 (£2,223.29), based on a population estimate of 342.7 million.
Although it would be roughly $14,348.79 (£10,935.20) for every person (roughly 69.6 million) in the UK.
If he wanted to give the entire globe an early Christmas present, then based on the rough world population estimate of 8.2 billion, everyone would receive $121.80 (£92.87).
Pay off the credit card
With $1trn, he could instantly rewrite history and erase debt interest payments and the government debt from dozens of the world’s sovereign nations.
Or Musk could wipe out the debts of Singapore ($1trn) or South Korea ($0.99trn) in one go, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook (Oct 2025).
But when it comes to the biggest debt-laden countries, $1trn would not even touch the sides.
The US has $38.3trn of government debt (just over one third of the total global debt pile) while the UK has a modest $4.1trn.
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