May’s NHS cash boost

Theresa May marked the 70th anniversary of the NHS this week by unveiling the biggest funding boost for the health service since Gordon Brown’s premiership. The NHS England budget is set to increase by an average of 3.4% a year above inflation over the next five years. This means that by
2023, the budget – currently £114bn a year – will be £20bn higher in real terms. Under the plan, an additional £4bn or so will be given to the rest of the UK, although it will be up to the Welsh and Scottish governments to decide how that is spent.

Insisting that the NHS was now her “number one spending priority”, the PM said the service would have to play its part to ensure “every penny is well spent”. She conceded that taxpayers would have “to contribute a bit more” to help pay for the cash boost, but also suggested, more controversially, that the measure would be partly funded by a “Brexit dividend”, a claim dismissed as “tosh” by the Tory MP Sarah Wollaston. Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, welcomed the deal, despite having argued for months that the NHS budget needed rises of at least 4% a year.

Hospital waiting times on the rise. Delays in getting GP appointments. “Appalling cancer and stroke survival rates.” The NHS is clearly struggling, said the Daily Mail. May’s promised cash injection
will “provide staff and patients with some much-needed relief”. After average real increases for the NHS of only 1.3% a year since 2010, this budget hike will certainly be well received, said The Independent. It’s larger than many expected: significantly, it exceeds the £350m-a-week figure that was cited on the side of the famous Leave campaign bus.

May has finally woken up to the dire state of the NHS, said the FT. But given that the service, over the course of its history, has enjoyed annual spending increases averaging 3.7%, a rise of 3.4% is hardly “revolutionary”. It falls well short of the amount experts believe is needed to improve the quality of healthcare. The NHS needs new thinking as much as new money, said The Daily Telegraph. We’ve seen before how budget hikes can be swallowed up by higher pay and more bureaucracy, leaving the service in no better shape. “It is at least arguable that the way in which the
NHS is structured and paid for is part of the reason why it always runs into the financial buffers.”

May’s birthday present to the NHS is “a big box full of dissimulation and crass propaganda”,
said Ben Chu in The Independent. The budget increase is “a return to normal service”, not
an act of “historic spending largesse”. As for the idea that it represents some kind of “Brexit
dividend”, this is an insult to voters’ intelligence. The UK will be contributing money to the EU
for several more years at least; and any savings we do make in the near future will be more than
outweighed by the fiscal costs of exit, which the Government’s own figures put at £15bn a year.
May’s playing of the “Brexit bonanza card” is transparently cynical, said Matthew Norman in
the same paper. But it may nevertheless go down well with voters and Eurosceptic MPs,
winning the PM “a little more time on the Brexit tightrope”.

So where will the extra NHS funds come from, if not Brexit? The answer is far from clear, said
Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The Treasury could always raise rates of income tax, but
it would have to hike them by between 3p and 4p in the pound to generate £20bn. That would
be unpopular with both Tory MPs and voters, and risk tipping the economy into recession.
Alternatively, the Treasury could borrow, but that would neutralise the Tories’ main line of
attack against Labour. While May can promise more money for the NHS, Chancellor
Philip Hammond “may find it impossible to actually deliver it at his Budget in the autumn”.
The Government will have to do something to meet the costs of our rapidly ageing population,
said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. This doesn’t only involve the NHS. The social care system
– which is “inextricably linked” to the NHS and is the subject of a delayed green paper due
this autumn – also needs to be properly resourced. If it isn’t, then pouring extra money into
hospitals and GP surgeries will be – as a health minister recently put it – “like running the bath
with the plug out”. Already, one in ten hospital patients are there only because there is nobody
to look after them outside. May should be taking bold steps to address the long-term challenges
facing the NHS and social care. Instead, she’s engaged in timid “managerialism”.