Budget fails to address stretched healthcare services

Rishi Sunak has come under fire for failing to lay out a blueprint to restore the UK’s battered health services in his Budget, with Covid-19 support for the NHS set to be scaled back and no sign of a plan to fund social care.

Campaigners warned that more cash would be needed to clear a backlog of thousands of operations postponed after the virus took hold, as it emerged that, with emergency pandemic funding being reduced, the health budget is set to fall year-on-year in 2021-22.

Although Sunak confirmed an additional £1.6bn for the UK’s vaccine programme in the Budget, he made only two passing references to the NHS and none to social care during his 50-minute address.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a think-tank, said his failure to outline a plan to help health services recover was “striking”.

An increase in the NHS budget for the next financial year was likely to be needed “as well as honesty that patients are going to end up waiting longer for some time”, Edwards added.

After Sunak pledged a year ago to spend “whatever it needs, whatever it costs” to support the health service through the crisis, expenditure on the NHS soared to about £147bn — around the level it had been expected to reach only in 2023-24.

In 2021-22, spending on the NHS will fall to £139bn: £136bn originally earmarked, plus an initial £3bn for Covid-19 costs. If this sum is not increased during the course of the coming year it would represent a sharp plunge from the £18bn extra spent on coronavirus in 2020-21.

Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at The King’s Fund, another think-tank, said that, on the face of it, the Budget suggested planned NHS spending on Covid-19 would be dramatically lower in 2021/22 than it was this year.

However, he cautioned that health services had received additional spending boosts after the Budget in 2020, suggesting “that this will not be the final word on spending for next year”.

“The NHS will surely need additional funding to meet any future waves of the virus and make some headway into the rising waits for care that have built up”, he said.

Franco Sassi, professor of international health policy and economics at Imperial College London, lamented the lack of additional structural funding for the NHS that could help it catch up with European peers, “disappointing given the large underfunding of the system”, he said.

Before the pandemic, healthcare expenditure in the UK had been 43 per cent lower than in Germany and 15 per cent lower than in France, after accounting for differences in purchasing power, he noted.

Boris Johnson promised to bring forward a solution to the country’s long-running dilemma over how to fund care for elderly and disabled people when he was elected Conservative party leader in July 2019.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said she would seek assurances that the lack of any mention of social care in the Budget “does not reflect an intention on the part of this government to renege on its repeated promise to ‘fix’ care by bringing forward concrete proposals later in the year”.