NHS: Give Us The £350m You Promised

The infamous £350m a week for the NHS that Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and other Brexiteers crowed about during the referendum should now be given to the struggling health service, the head of NHS England has demanded.

The Leavers claimed on the side of a campaign bus and in countless speeches that Britain would save that much money by not having to hand it over to the EU so it could instead be given to the NHS, adding up to an extra £18.2bn a year.

So now NHS chief executive Simon Stevens has in effect demanded “Show us the money!”, warning that otherwise voters would lose trust in politics.

That is assuming, of course, that there is any trust left following the stream of scandals that have hit Westminster and the continuing revelations about the real impact of Brexit.

With waiting times worsening in the nation’s hospitals Stevens said the NHS should be given the £350m weekly cash boost it was promised in the referendum.

Speaking to an NHS Providers conference in Birmingham, he warned that “democracy will not be strengthened if Chancellor Philip Hammond argues in his budget this month that economic turbulence caused by Brexit” means he cannot now provide extra cash for the health service.

“It Was On The Bus”

Stevens said the NHS was not on the ballot paper for the Brexit referendum. “But it was on the battle bus,” he said. “Vote Leave for a better funded health service – £350m a week.”

And he cited an admission earlier this year by the Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cumming that the pro-Brexit camp may well have lost the vote if they had not deployed the £350m battle bus pledge.

“Rather that criticising these clear Brexit funding commitments to NHS patients – promises entered into by Cabinet Ministers and by MPs – the public want to see them honoured,” Stevens said.

“By the end of the NHS’s next financial year – March 2019 – the UK will have left the EU. Trust in democratic politics will not be strengthened if anyone now tries to argue ‘You voted Brexit, partly for a better funded health service, but precisely because of Brexit, you can’t have it now.’ “

Stevens warned that cancer treatments and mental health care could deteriorate if ministers were not willing to give the NHS the billions in extra funding it needs. He said the waiting list for hospital operations could hit 5 million patients.

The service “has a funding problem”, he said, and yet spending on the NHS is expected to “nosedive” over the next two years. “The budget for next year is well short of what’s needed to look after our patients and their families in their time of need.”

Don’t Be Like Greece

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, told the conference that the NHS was the best-funded health service in Europe. But Stevens (left) directly contradicted him in withering terms.

“Some may say ‘Aren’t we spending at the European average?‘. Well only if you think that bundling austerity-shrunken Greek and Portuguese health spending should shape the benchmark for Britain,“ Stevens said.

“If instead you think that modern Britain should look more like Germany or France or Sweden, then you are under-funding our health service by £20b to £30b a year.”

Stevens won praise from Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, the trade association for health service providers. “We strongly welcome the directness, honesty and clarity of what Simon Stevens has said,” Hopson said.

“We have been arguing for some time that the NHS can no longer deliver what it needs to on the funding available and it is important that Simon Stevens has said this for the first time clearly and publicly.”

“He is right to warn that without extra funding there will be consequences for patients, who will have to wait longer and may not get the treatment they should have when they need it. We are all now clear about the importance of the decision that the Government faces in the forthcoming budget.”

 

by Bob Graham

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