Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has rowed back on his leaked comments about charity lobbying, saying that charities should challenge the government but they have to recognise there will be “trade-offs”.

It comes after Streeting said he wanted to “break the culture” of the voluntary sector and how it lobbies the government, in a video leaked to the Mail on Sunday.

In the video, Streeting described the Royal Osteoporosis Society as the “worst offender” for lobbying the government and described voluntary organisations as “stakeholders, not partners”.

But Streeting rowed back on his comments yesterday at a World Cancer Day event hosted by Macmillan Cancer Support, where he said: “Charities have got an important campaigning role and it’s right to challenge government. 

“It’s right to hold government to account and it’s totally legitimate for organisations to campaign and advocate on behalf of their particular group.”

But Streeting said charities should recognise that Labour has “only been in government for five minutes” and that the government has to make “trade-offs”.

He said: “If this is a partnership, and I think it should be, a partnership involves acknowledging the choices and the trade-offs [that we have to make].”

Streeting said that if all the government had to do was to get the NHS “back on its feet” from the “worst crisis in its history” and “build a national care service worthy of the name”, then that would be “two enormous, historic things”.

But he added there were competing priorities across government, pointing towards challenges in education, “unprecedented global threats” and pressures on defence spending, lack of suitable homes, rising child poverty levels and economic pressures.

“These are not easy challenges,” Streeting said, but he added: “We wanted this task, we’ve been trusted to deliver and we will.

“But in the spirit of getting this right and building the partnership we need, as a country we all need to be honest about those choices, those trade-offs and what we really want to prioritise,” he said.

“Government can’t do this alone. It’s not all on us. We have to do it with business, with civil society and with all of our citizens. 

“That requires all of us to be honest about the choices, the trade-offs, what we can afford, what we would really prioritise, what we’re prepared to say stop to and what we’re willing to say no to,” Streeting said.