Conservative party pledges extra £8bn a year for NHS

By The Guardian

George Osborne has moved to address concerns that the Tories have abandoned compassionate Conservatism by pledging to protect the “precious” NHS with a guarantee of an £8bn increase in spending per year above inflation by 2020.

In a week that has seen signs of a slip in Tory poll ratings and claims that the Conservative party is running a highly personalised campaign against Labour leader Ed Miliband, the chancellor has moved to issue an “absolute commitment” to deliver the resources required by the NHS.

Writing in the Guardian, the chancellor claims the Conservatives will pledge in their general election manifesto, to be launched next week, to meet a £30bn per year funding gap by the end of the decade identified by Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England.

The Stevens plan says that the gap would be filled through £22bn in efficiency savings, requiring an extra £8bn in governmental spending a year by 2020 over and above increases in line with inflation. This will come on top of the extra £2bn announced in the autumn statement.

NHS England currently has an annual budget of £102bn. With Osborne’s pledge factored in, this is forecast to increase in cash terms to £122bn by 2020.

Osborne writes: “We back the NHS’s plan, but there’s no point having a plan without the funding to deliver it, so today we commit to deliver what the NHS needs ... I can confirm that in the Conservative manifesto next week we will commit to a minimum real terms increase in NHS funding of £8bn in the next five years.”

The chancellor adds: “Decisions about spending go to the heart of our politics because they reflect our values. We in the Conservative party are in no doubt about our approach: the NHS is something precious, we value it for the security it provides to everyone in our country, and we will always give it the resources it needs.”

Downing Street will hope that the funding pledge may provide a poll boost to the Tories, and go some way to meeting – or at least neutralising – Labour’s lead on the NHS. The public health service is regularly listed by voters as the most important issue in the election campaign.