More than £110m to Yorkshire and North East as Government outlines plans to get NHS through second Covid winter

Health Minister Edward Argar told MPs this morning that “the Government is doing “everything in our power to give our NHS what it needs and keep it standing strong” over the colder months, when he provided an update on how £700m of winter funding will be spent across the country.

The cash has been set aside for the coming weeks to tackle long waiting lists and help increase the capacity of services, with £112m assigned to Yorkshire and the North East.

The money is part of £5.4bn already announced to help the NHS through the pandemic during the second half of this year.

In total, 26 hospital trusts across the regions have had funding for projects approved, such as updating technology or expanding wards.

Mr Argar said this winter will be “critical for our NHS” as “we face the challenge of fighting Covid-19 and a new Omicron variant, along with other challenges like flu that winter can bring”.

He explained: “We are doing everything we can to strengthen our vital defences. One of our main defences is, of course, our vaccination programmes and we are expanding our booster programme, which hit the milestone of 19 million doses yesterday, along with delivering the largest flu vaccination programme in UK history.

“Yesterday, we announced how we will buying a total of 114 million additional Pfizer and Moderna doses for 2022 and 2023, which will future-proof our great British vaccination efforts and make sure we can protect even more people in the years ahead.”

However, Labour’s new Shadow Health Secretary has said that it is not a “serious strategy” to build the workforce needed to keep the health service going.

“Ministers cannot possibly believe that what we have been given today is a credible plan to meet these enormous challenges,.” Wes Streeting said.

“If this were genuinely a plan about preparing for the winter, why does it arrive on December 3?”

He added: “A serious plan to bring down waiting lists would have the workforce at its heart, a serious plan to bring down waiting lists would have clear targets and deadlines, and a serious plan to bring down waiting lists would recognise that unless we focus on prevention, early intervention and fixing the social care crisis, ministers have no chance of bringing waiting lists down to the record low levels we saw under the last Labour government.”