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Autumn and winter are always the seasons when the state of the NHS becomes a growing concern and, right on cue, a day after the clocks went back, health funding is on the front pages. The Guardian has splashed with the news that five MPs, including Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative who chairs the Commons health committee, have written to the Treasury saying it should stop claiming that it has put an extra £10bn into the NHS because that’s not true. Here’s our story.
Related: Theresa May’s claim on NHS funding not true, say MPs
TELEGRAPH: Hospital beds and A&E Units face axe #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers http://pic.twitter.com/PUFXYwqAtj
Well, it’s only technically correct if you’re looking at spending on NHS England and you add an extra year to the spending review and you also take account of the switch from other budgets that we would normally think of as health spending. So, for example, you can only arrive at the £10bn by shifting money from public health budgets and from health education and training, and also by changing the date at which you calculate real terms increases. So, yes, you can see how they have arrived at the figure. But the real figure we feel should be quoted at £4.5bn which is considerably less … That’s over the period of the spending review and that’s the period that we usually talk about increases in spending. We wouldn’t normally, say for other government departments, just add an extra year.
[Stevens] was very clear when he came before our committee during our inquiry that if you look at the middle years, next year and the year after, we are going to be seeing a far more constrained situation, and certainly not what he asked for. So, certainly, for 2018-19 we will be seeing a per capita fall in funding for the NHS at a time when our demographics [are changing], the increase in older people, a 21% increase in the number of people over 65 in the last decade up to 2015.
‘Government wrong on NHS spending’ – @sarahwollaston says actual figure £4.5bn rather than £10bn they have claimed https://t.co/BfALjw4bMg http://pic.twitter.com/BVT6qNe3F2
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Sig Nordal 