The NHS will need an extra £38 billion a year by 2030, the think tank warns
The NHS will need £38 billion more a year than planned by the end of the next parliament to tackle the care backlog and end long delays in treatment, political parties have been warned.
Labor and Conservative promises on NHS funding “remain well short” of what the beleaguered health service needs to recover from years of underinvestment, the Health Foundation has said.
Politicians are not being honest with the public about the money needed to revive an NHS struggling with record numbers awaiting care, insufficient access to GPs and a collapse in public satisfaction, it added.
The NHS will need such huge sums to meet rising demand for care that the next government will face “difficult trade-offs” in how it allocates scarce resources, the think tank said. If the health service does not receive enough funding in the coming years it would mean that recent promises to improve the NHS will not be kept.
The Department of Health and Social Care’s budget will increase by £7.6 billion to £196.9 billion by 2029/2030 under current spending plans. But it will need to rise by a further £38 billion to £235.4 billion if whoever is in power after July 4 wants to see a “sustained improvement” in their performance, modeling from the Health Foundation shows.
“Healthcare is in crisis and the main political parties have said they want to fix it. Yet the funding they have promised so far remains far below the level needed to make improvements,” said Anita Charlesworth, director of the think tank’s long-term economic analysis division.
The NHS will need an average annual budget increase of 3.8% over the next decade to keep pace with an aging, growing and increasingly sick population, the think tank has calculated.
That 3.8% is significantly above the forecast rate of economic growth (1.9%) and the planned increase in spending on public services (1.6%) for that period. It also goes well beyond the expected amount if ministers stick to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s projected 0.8% increase in health spending, the think tank added.
The analysis said: “Tackling the funding needed to improve the NHS would mean making difficult trade-offs with the funding needed by other public services and levels of taxation.
“The honesty about these trade-offs has so far been conspicuous by its absence in a general election debate marked by ‘a conspiracy of silence’ over the public spending and tax choices the next government will face.”
Whoever becomes Prime Minister on July 5 must “align with the public” on the actual level of funding the NHS will have to deliver again on key waiting times targets, such as the 18-week waiting period for hospital care, and paying more staff to personnel. and increasing capital investment.
NHS bosses endorsed the Health Foundation’s analysis. “Simply put, if a new government is to deliver on campaign promises to tackle NHS disadvantages and improve performance, it will need to invest further,” said Dr Layla McCay, policy director of the NHS Confederation. The NHS will need “billions in additional funding”, she added.
Julian Hartley, the chief executive of hospital group NHS Providers, said healthcare funds urgently need more capital funding to tackle the impact of “chronic underinvestment in buildings and facilities”, which has left some hospitals so dilapidated that they “fail to ensure the safety of patients and staff endanger” .