The government has been accused of pulling emergency funding from the NHS via a £30.1bn cut in day-to-day spending on health in the budget from April this year, as Labour said extra funds were still needed with waiting lists at record levels.
The Treasury said the cut came from those emergency funds directly linked to the pandemic – with NHS core funding still set to rise by £7bn.
The total funding for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is to fall from £199.2bn in 2020/21 to £169.1bn next year, with the drop allocated from Covid-19 spending.
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, will visit a hospital in Derby on Thursday morning to highlight new analysis by the party showing the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment has increased by more than 500% over the last decade and that almost a quarter of a million people are waiting more than a year for treatment.
The Treasury said it was misleading to suggest there would be a £30.1bn cut to the health service. “NHS funding excluding Covid is increasing by £7bn next year, we also have funding in the Covid reserve, which we can deploy if the NHS needs it. We’re committed to giving the NHS what they need to tackle the pandemic,” a Treasury spokesman said.
Labour has also underlined the lack of any mention of social care reform in the budget, despite the way care homes have suffered in the pandemic.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, the chancellor defended the lack of any pledge to fix social care, saying reform had to have cross-party consensus.
“We are committed to finding a cross-party solution to sustainable social care funding. It is important given the duration of social care funding,” Rishi Sunak said. “Right now our focus is the pandemic, but the health secretary has started that work and if we can find consensus we will bring that forward.”
Labour’s analysis found an estimated 4.59 million people are currently on the waiting list for treatment – the highest number on record. Of those, only 68% of patients on the waiting list have been waiting 18 weeks or less – a huge gulf with the statutory target for 92% of patients to receive treatment within 18 weeks of referral.
In November, the Health Foundation estimated that clearing the backlogs and reducing waiting times would cost approximately £2bn a year over the next three years.
The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, said the chancellor was “failing patients, our NHS and its staff by cutting frontline services during a pandemic. With lists already at a record high, this will mean patients waiting even longer in pain for vital treatment.
“Yesterday’s budget papered over the cracks rather than rebuilding the foundations of our country.”
NHS bosses said Sunak had left the service “out in the cold” despite its widely admired response to Covid-19.
The NHS Confederation, which represents health service trusts, and the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, say the NHS needs £10bn extra next year to deal with the effects of the pandemic, far more than the £3bn increase Sunak pledged in his autumn statement in November.
The confederation accused the chancellor of breaking his pledge, made as the pandemic was unfolding, to give the NHS “whatever it takes” to tackle it.
Its interim chief executive, Danny Mortimer, said: Last year the chancellor promised ‘absolutely’ and ‘categorically’ to give the NHS ‘whatever resources’ it needed to get through the crisis. Today this promise seems to have evaporated.
“The chancellor had a lot to prove in this budget but sadly he has once again left funding for health and social care services desperately wanting. The health service will feel that it has been left out in the cold.
“The NHS has faced an unprecedented and almighty battle over the past year and has at times come very close to breaking point, so to continually under-resource and underfund both the health service and social care sector when they are facing the biggest challenge they have ever seen is of huge concern.”
