The NHS is set to receive a £22.6 billion cash injection over the next two years, the chancellor Rachel Reeves announced.
Delivering her Budget in the Commons, she said that the NHS was the nation’s ‘most cherished public service’ and the extra funding, the biggest spending increase outside Covid since 2010, would help the government cut waiting lists.
‘Because of this record injection of funding, because of the thousands of additional beds that we have secured, and because of the reforms that we are delivering in our NHS, we can now begin to bring waiting lists down more quickly and move towards our target for waiting times to be no longer than 18 weeks by delivering on our manifesto commitment for 40,000 extra hospital appointments a week,’ said Reeves.
- Labour promises £1.4 billion to cut NHS waiting list in five years
- No mention of nursing in Budget speech
- UK government promises £200m in funding for NHS Dental Recovery Plan
She said the Labour party would publish a 10-year plan for the NHS in the spring, which would set out how to deliver ‘a shift from hospital to community, from analogue to digital and from sickness to prevention’. Overall, the Treasury said, the average annual increase to the day-to-day NHS in England budget was 4%, while the total increase for the Department of Health and Social Care was 3.4%.
Reeves also announced an additional £3.1bn increase in the capital budget over this year and next year, which will go towards repairs to crumbling hospitals, tens of thousands more procedures and fund new beds and diagnostic tests.
While leading health charities welcomed the additional funding, they cautioned that more would be needed for real improvement.
Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund, said that the cash injection is ‘unlikely to be enough for patients to see a real improvement in the care they receive’.
He added that since much of the £22.6 billion would be absorbed by NHS staff pay increases and the rising cost of delivering care, ‘it is unlikely to drastically improve care over the rest of this year, and certainly not overnight’.
Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said that the announcement brought a ‘welcome boost’ but much more would be needed to bring the healthcare system out of its ‘very tough’ position.
‘Almost £14bn is needed to plug a rocketing backlog of NHS repairs. Vital bits of the NHS are literally falling apart, putting quality of care and sometimes the safety of patients and staff at risk. The devil is often in the detail and it will be critical to ensure that welcome funding increases fall where they are needed, including to bring down waits for mental health and community services and to improve ambulance performance.’