This week marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of the National Health Service.

I’m proud of the NHS, the most enduring legacy of the socialist and progressive measures taken by the radical 1945 Labour Government.

The real heroes of our NHS are its hardworking and dedicated staff, from staff nurses to junior doctors and hospital porters to ambulance paramedics.

They are the lifeblood of our health service, without which it wouldn’t exist.

Every family has their own NHS story, and like everyone else my gratitude to our health service is because of the treatment I and my family have received over many years and generations. And I’m really proud that my mum has worked in the NHS for 36 years, and that aunts, great-aunts and cousins were NHS nurses and midwives both here in England and in Northern Ireland.

The travesty of recent years is the abject failure of this Government to support our NHS staff.

Since 2010, we have seen this Government in disputes with junior doctors and nurses, impose real terms pay cuts in back to back years and preside over a devastating series of winter crises in our hospitals that has stretched staff morale to breaking point.

Just this year, new figures revealed that here in St Helens, Government mismanagement of our NHS has quadrupled the bill for agency nurses, because of staff shortages after they cut nurse training places.

The NHS, its staff and its patients desperately need a Labour government that can deal with these crises and support our NHS in the years to come and preserve that most progressive idea of a healthcare system free at the point of use, available to those who need it.