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Keir Starmer has been making a campaign visit to Kings Mill hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield in the east Midlands, to back up Labour’s announcement that it intends to digitise the NHS “red book” that parents use for their children’s medical records.

Previous health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock had both hoped to implement a digitisation policy, but it was yet to happen, a fact pointed out by shadow mental health minister Abena Oppong-Asare on Sky News during the morning media round, when she said:

This is something that the government had previously announced that they would implement in 2017. And there is money already put aside for NHS digital moving forward, but that hasn’t been implemented.

We do need to move with the times. The equipment that’s being used is massively out of date, a quarter of a century out of date, and conversations that I’ve had with healthcare professionals, they feel massively frustrated that they don’t have the relevant technology.

Oppong-Asare said she believed that digitising the records and incorporating them into the NHS app might help with the low uptake of some childhood vaccines in the UK, specifically mentioning measles.

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Mel Stride, the government Work and Pension secretary, was also talking about mental health and young people’s mental health on the media round earlier, although with a slightly different tack. He was saying the government was aiming to get more people who had been experiencing mental health issues back to work.

He told listeners to the BBC’s Today programme:

We need to be having a grown up and sensible conversation about where we’re going with mental health. It is very good news that we are more open about discussing mental health, far too many people suffered in silence in the past.

However, I think we also need to look very carefully about whether we are beginning to label or medicalise conditions that in the past would have been seen as the ups and downs of life. We all go through difficult times in our life. That is regrettable, but it is part and a natural part of the human condition.

None of that is to suggest that there aren’t additional pressures that have contributed to mental health problems … Covid and lockdown and so on, and I would add to that, incidentally, particularly for young people, social media and the impact of that. But we do need to have this grown up discussion.

Stride went on to say:

At the heart of the approach that I’m taking is perhaps it’s an old fashioned belief – but I think it’s one that needs to come back into fashion – is that work is good for you.

Work is good for your mental health. Getting up in the morning, having a sense of purpose, interacting with other people in the workplace, having a conversation at the water-cooler, or whatever it may be, is good for our mental health.

And there’s plenty of evidence that shows that, so my mission is to get as many people into work as possible. And I care the most about those who can benefit from work in the way that I’ve described. And that’s why I’m reviewing the process by which people go onto these long term benefits.

There is quite a healthcare theme developing today, and Wes Streeting has also been commenting this morning on a pledge made by London Mayor Sadiq Khan that if he is reelected in May, he would pledge £800,000 to “plug gaps” in mental health support for the most deprived schools in the capital.

Streeting said he was “delighted to see children and young people’s mental health high on Sadiq’s agenda. Really excited by these plans – and a Labour government working with our Labour Mayor will be able to go even further.”

Khan made the pledge late last night in the Mirror, saying it would “plug some of the gaps left by cuts and provide young people, their schools, and youth workers with the proper support they need”.

He said “Children and young people’s mental health is a public health emergency. It’s shocking that so many of our young Londoners are facing mental health difficulties. This is a crisis of the Tories’ making.”

In the Reform UK briefing, Richard Tice was dismissive of those comments by Labour’s Wes Streeting, saying “he must have heard what our conference was about because he wrote a few lines in a daily newspaper this morning.”

Tice compared Labour’s oft-cited pledge to spend £28bn on what he described as “their ridiculous green agenda that would have achieved nothing” to the £1bn figure he said they had pledged to use private healthcare capacity, saying Labour were showing “weak ambition”.

He said Streeting had claimed it would take a decade to sort out healthcare, but Reform UK were aiming for a zero patient waiting list within two years.

Tice claims that three main prongs of their policy would drive up capacity in the healthcare sector in the UK, proposing to vastly increase tax relief on private healthcare to drive uptake, use money to procure spare private healthcare capacity for the NHS, and that to attract and retain frontline healthcare staff they will pay zero basic rate income tax for three years.

He also claimed that Labour had a secret plan “to put VAT on all independent healthcare”, and said that instead of giving more money to “bungling NHS bureaucrats” he wanted to bring in logistics people from the likes of FedEx, Amazon and the military to sort out what he said was “the lack of productivity” in the NHS.

One part of the Reform UK briefing was directly addressed at Labour’s shadow health spokesperson Wes Streeting, who was also on the media round this morning.

Here is a flavour of what Streeting was setting out earlier as Labour’s plans for health. Describing it as a “pragmatic” argument, he told GB News:

It seems mad to me that we’ve got spare capacity in the private sector and we’re not using it.

You’ve got a situation today where middle and upper class people who can pay to go private are being seen faster, getting diagnosed more quickly and treated more quickly, which is certainly better for their quality of life but better for their outcomes.

And then working class people are left behind because they’re priced out of this two-tier system.

What I’m proposing is the Labour government would use spare capacity in the private sector to bring down waiting lists faster, but no one will have to worry about the bill.

I’m not happy about this because I think the NHS should have the staff, the equipment, the technology it needs without relying on the private sector, but I’ve got to deal with the world as it is after 14 years of Conservative government, not the world as I would wish it to be.

Of course, in the longer term Labour’s ambition is through workforce expansion, doubling the number of scanners and building on our proud record as a party of making sure that in future the NHS has the staff, the equipment and the technology it needs to treat patients, and to honour that founding principle of the NHS as a public service free at the point of use there for us when we need it.

On the Today programme, asked about the future of social care, Streeting said he would not be bounced into announcing something from the next Labour manifesto, but told listeners:

I would hope that the next Labour government won’t just provide an answer to the immediate crisis in social care but will set out a long-term direction for investment and reform that can command consensus across the divide and can last for generations, as we did on the NHS in 1948.

I’ll come back with some key points from the Reform UK briefing in a moment – essentially as expected Richard Tice has said the party would scrap net zero targets and use the money to fund a huge expansion of private healthcare provision – but my main takeaway was tonally it was pitched as if the party were the main opposition to an expected Labour government, and there was very little in there addressing the current administration.

Labour leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has written for the Daily Record today repeating his attack on what he has called “the SNP’s financial mismanagement”.

He writes:

It is not those with “the broadest shoulders” bearing the brunt of the SNP’s tax rises, as Humza Yousaf promised – it is ordinary working people, many of whom are struggling with high bills, soaring rents, and rising food prices.

Nurses, teachers, and council workers are all seeing their tax bills rise while they watch their services decline.

Sarwar has been criticising the SNP tax policy for raising taxes for those earning £29,000 and above, although some analysis has shown tha UK-wide national insurance changes will cancel out much of the rise for higher earners.

Richard Tice has opened up this Reform UK briefing by talking about “the woke managerial middle class who happen to be eco-zealots” and has introduced Lee Anderson who is reminiscing about coal-mining and is talking specifically about the mineworkers’ pension scheme.