Health hiatus

IT is understandable, given the scale of the cuts, that the coalition should be making a virtue out of its decision to increase NHS spending to demonstrate that Ministers do have a social conscience. What might be more beneficial, however, is some financial transparency.
By The Newsroom
Published 26th Oct 2010, 23:06 BST
Updated 26th Oct 2010, 23:06 BST

Some have claimed that the NHS budget should not be ring-fenced, given the size of its budget and the tough decisions that are having to be made by other departments.

Yet, while the convoluted health bureaucracy should not be immune from efficiency savings, spending will increase by a mere 0.1 per cent a year in real terms over the next four years – a marginal rise that will be offset, according to the King's Fund, by the cost of caring for an ageing population and other inflationary pressures.

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Furthermore, David Cameron and George Osborne's vitriolic language – rhetoric intended to embarrass their Labour opponents – takes no account of their decision to slash town hall budgets by a quarter over the duration of the Parliament, and the implications that this decision will have on the care of the elderly.

One consequence is even more elderly patients becoming "bed blockers" in hospitals because money for community care has run out, a false economy that Ministers appear to have arrogantly disregarded.

In short, money is being denied to local care services so Ministers

can claim to have fulfilled an election promise – a rarity given the Liberal Democrats' volte-face on tuition fees – and increased the headline amount allocated to the NHS. While no decision is going to be straight-forward, the public may, just, be more tolerant if there was greater transparency from their leaders rather than the partisan trading of statistics. After all, it was Mr Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, who said that "a new politics" was required to treat the nation's political ills.

Related topics:David CameronNHSLabour