Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week is the fourth in our series of episodes over Parliament's summer recess, speaking to experts,

looking at how Labour performed in their first year in office in some key policy areas.

This week, I'm delighted to say we have not one but two brilliant guests to discuss probably the single most important policy area outside of the economy for this government, health. Labor has long stated his reputation as being the defenders of the NHS and made big promises ahead of last year's election about fixing a broken system of healthcare in this country. But 12 months on, how they lived up to those pledges. Later in the episode, I'll speak to Siva Anna and Deceva, director of policy at the King's Fund think tank, about the government's new 10-year plan to reform the health service and how West Treatying is faring as health secretary. But we're going to start with my conversation with Dame Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation charity. And I began by asking her how she would assess Lib's overall performance on health and social care so far. Probably a B-minus, I think, I would give. It's not an A because there's lots of issues around and we'll get

on to these and the way they've been handled. Social care, as you say, is not addressed.

But it's not a C because the inheritance was actually quite difficult. And I think if you look

at the policies that Labour have developed over

the last year, they're kind of in the right ballpark generally. So I think they've made a good

fist of trying to assess the terrain, but the performance is still a problem. And I think they've

set themselves some traps as well. You touched on it there. I think before we kind of get into it,

if we kind of, I suppose, make an assessment of where the NHS was when they took over,

they inherited NHS in crisis. Lord Darcy commissioned to review it.

And he said the NHS was in critical condition.

Do you think that that's essentially that part of the problem that the government faces now is that

perhaps things were even worse perhaps than they expected? I'm not sure they're worse than expected.

I mean, I thought Aradazi did a really fine report and I completely agree with the conclusions there.

And Ara was very careful to say it's not really the model, it's kind of the funding and the stable policy that's needed.

So there wasn't a sort of existential crisis about the NHS itself.

I think there was a slight disasterisation narrative that was then put on that by politicians.

NHS has broken, last chance saloon type of stick.

And I think that it was unhelpful because the broken sort of sounds that it just, as a model,

it isn't broken.

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