Reform UK says it will never charge for the NHS. Their leaders say something very different.
Reform UK’s official line is consistent: the NHS will remain free at the point of delivery. But Nigel Farage has spent over a decade saying something else entirely — on camera, in interviews, and in parliament.
In 2012, footage from Farage’s “Common Sense” tour captured him telling UKIP supporters that the NHS should move to an insurance-based system run by private companies. In that recording, he can be heard saying he would “feel more comfortable” if his money was “competed for by different insurance companies” rather than handed to central government. The video was suppressed for two years before emerging in 2014.
It was not a one-off. In 2015, Farage told the BBC that replacing the NHS with an insurance-based system was “a debate that we’re all going to have to return to.”
The most damaging recent statements came in early 2025. In a January 2025 LBC interview with Lewis Goodall, Farage said he would consider a “French-style” NHS insurance system under a Reform government, saying: “I’m open to anything.”
Then, in a Sky News interview ahead of the May local elections, Farage was pressed on whether he supports the NHS being funded through general taxation. He said: “I do not want it funded through general taxation. It doesn’t work.”
In December 2024, a Telegraph interview quoted him saying: “The funding of the NHS is a total failure. The French do it much better… If you can afford it, you pay; if you can’t, you don’t.”
At Prime Minister’s Questions in February 2025, Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice were caught on camera nodding and smiling as Keir Starmer described Reform’s plan to replace the principle of free NHS care with an insurance-based model.
The clip — filmed from the chamber — is among the most widely shared pieces of video evidence against Reform on the NHS.
Watch it: Best for Britain — PMQs clip, 5 February 2025 (Twitter/X)
Reform’s 2024 “contract” pledged 20% tax relief on all private healthcare and insurance — a direct state subsidy for those wealthy enough to go private. It also suggested cutting NHS funding by £26 billion.
Deputy leader Richard Tice has stated that Reform’s ambition to reduce the state to 35% of GDP would require public spending cuts of nearly £300 billion — without specifying where those cuts fall.
Reform says one thing in manifestos. Their leaders say another in interviews, on video, and in parliament. Health Secretary Wes Streeting warned that Farage’s approach would reduce the NHS to “a poor service for poor people, with working people forced to pay to go private.”
The evidence — much of it in Farage’s own words, on camera — is there for anyone who looks.