Tories must find extra NHS funds to win back trust
THERE was a time when all the Labour party had to do to get its vote out at election time was to tell people they had “24 hours to save the NHS”. These scare tactics worked at all the elections Tony Blair led Labour into because the Conservatives had a definite weak spot in the public mind when it came to the health service.
Whether it was down to underfunding healthcare while in office or manifesto promises offering tax breaks for people to go private, it seemed to many voters that the Tories didn’t appreciate the NHS’s ethos.
Under David Cameron all that changed. The Tories accepted that the NHS had become what the former chancellor Nigel Lawson termed “a national religion” and there was no point in trying to foist upon the public any system that tailored access to treatment to ability to pay. Instead, they would focus on improving the NHS, continuing Blair’s method of prioritising it for extra funds.
The Tories then came out on top at four elections in a row, not necessarily just because of their changed approach to healthcare, but clearly in part due to having removed the issue as an Achilles heel.
IT SHOULD not take a genius to work out that the state of the NHS right now will be a millstone around Conservative necks at the next election unless things are radically improved. This makes Health Secretary Steve Barclay a central figure in UK politics for the next 18 months or so.
The situation facing him is truly dire. Swathes of the service are close to collapse. Its vital statistics, or “key performance indicators” to use the jargon, are all going in the wrong direction. From ambulance response times, to queues for getting GP appointments, from waits in A&E to delays getting referred for cancer diagnosis or treatment: everything seems to have turned bad at once. The overall hospital waiting list has just topped seven million – an all-time record. To cap it all, nurses are planning a series of strikes in pursuit of better pay just as the NHS faces its winter peak-season.
Astonishingly, Britain is currently suffering more “excess deaths” than it did at the height of the Covid pandemic. In England and Wales there were more than 1,500 such deaths every week in October, compared to 1,300 in 2021.
Part of that is an inevitable result of all the treatment and diagnostic work the NHS was unable to deliver during the Covid emergency. But part of it is also down to current underperformance, particularly the delays getting ambulances to heart attack and stroke victims.
Naturally there are some siren voices inside the Tory party who are saying, once again, that the NHS has become “unaffordable” and that the answer lies in various kinds of privatisation. Mr Barclay, along with PM Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, would be well-advised to dismiss them. Because the British public is nowhere near ready to give up on the ideals of the NHS and will certainly let Labour have a go at salvaging them if the Conservatives are seen to stop trying.
Any notion of cutting NHS future budgets in next week’s autumn financial statement ought to be ruled out. In our ageing society, spending more of our wealth on healthcare should not be seen as a sign either of inefficiency or unaffordability: it is exactly what is to be expected.
MR HUNT, himself a former health secretary, would be wise to find extra funds for the NHS, targeted at pulling it out of its current slump, rather than to put it on short rations.
It will primarily be down to Mr Barclay to ensure further funds deliver improvements on the frontline. More efficient casualty departments can reduce the appalling phenomenon of ambulances queuing for hours to unload patients. Fewer GPs should be permitted to go parttime, given the vast sums invested in training them. There are also arguments for restricting some non-essential services the NHS provides, such as the range of cosmetic treatments.
No doubt Mr Barclay will have plenty of ideas of his own. Offering a pay rise to nurses sufficient to neutralise the strike threat – though well short of the ridiculous 17 per cent the Royal College of Nursing is seeking – is another essential task.
There is unlikely to be a single “magic bullet” to turn around the NHS over the next year and a half, just the grind of implementing a sensible, unspectacular measures and utilising an uplift in resources. But make no mistake: If at the next election Labour leader Keir Starmer is able to claim “you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS”, and is widely believed, then it will be curtains for the Conservatives.
‘The situation is dire. Swathes of the service are in collapse’