Labour’s deputy leadership candidates piled pressure on Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, yesterday, with powerful criticism of the government’s management of NHS reform.

Speaking at a hustings event in Sheffield chaired by the Times columnist David Aaronovitch, Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, called for a moratorium on structural alterations, saying that health workers were “sick to death of constant change” and should be allowed to get on with their jobs.

Hazel Blears, the Labour Party chairman, said: “I think we’ve got some of our language wrong. When we’ve talked about reform sometimes, its been about telling people that they’re not doing a good job.”

In what will be seen as a reference to Ms Hewitt’s battles with health professionals, including junior doctors, which culminated in the Health Secretary surviving a no-confidence vote in the Commons last week, Ms Blears said that there needed to be a better partnership with such groups: “We’ve got 1.3 million people working in our health service. If those people are going home at the end of a hard day’s work feeling disgruntled with the Labour Government then we’re not going to win the next election.”

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, called for a “proper dialogue” with health workers, who still felt undervalued. He suggested that the Government “listened a bit too much to the BMA [British Medical Association] and not enough to unions like Unison. Maybe what we should be doing is bringing the unions in the health service much more closely into the social partnership”.

Harriet Harman, the Constitutional Affairs Minister, suggested that the Government had overlooked the potential of NHS doctors and nurses to reform their own working patterns: “We should never, ever be saying . . . we need the private sector to do the innovation because the public sector doesn’t innovate.” She criticised the “breaking-up of the NHS team” through “contracting out cleaners, caterers, healthcare assistants”. Like the backbench candidate Jon Crud-das, Ms Harman complained that the practice “has driven down pay and caused unequal pay between men and women”.

On Iraq, Ms Harman declared that she “would not have voted for the use of force if I had known there were no weapons of mass destruction”.

At the time of the 2003 invasion she was Solicitor-General. The advice of her colleague Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, that the war would be legal was central to the Government’s case. Yesterday she called for an inquiry into why Britain had invaded Iraq and the planning for the aftermath, and for a “proper discussion about this country’s relationship with America”. She welcomed the US as a strong ally, but added: “It is not about being their allies for the sake of it.”

At the end of Gordon Brown’s own question-and-answer session, Jan Wilson, the leader of Sheffield City Council, said: “There is a great big shadow that has not been mentioned, and you must tell us how you are going to tackle the way people feel about the Iraq situation.”

Mr Brown said that the war had been “one of the most divisive issues in British politics” but insisted that the question was how to deal with the “next stage . . . security, political reconciliation and giving people a stake in the future of Iraq”.

Countdown to handover

May 30 Hustings in Leicester

June 1 Close of supporting nominations. Deadline for withdrawal of nomination by declared candidates

June 2-16 Hustings in Glasgow, Newcastle, London, Cardiff and Oxford

June 21 Affiliate ballot closes

June 22 Labour members’ and MPs/MEPs’ ballots close

June 24 Leadership conference in Manchester and announcement of results

June 27 Tony Blair and John Prescott resign; Gordon Brown and his deputy take charge

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