MAY BAILOUT TO SAVE HEALTH TORIES PLEDGE £600M A WEEK TO NHS
THERESA May will today promise the cash-starved NHS an extra £20billion by 2023 to stop it falling apart – around £600million a week.
It will mean the £110billion front line NHS budget increasing by more than three per cent a year.
But that is still nearly two per cent LESS than the health service would get if Jeremy Corbyn was Prime Minister.
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth today tells the Sunday Mirror he would give the NHS an immediate £7.7billion – plus more than £1billion for social care.
Over the coming 12 months the NHS will only get around half that – less than £4billion.
Mr Ashworth said: “People live longer with more complicated sets of conditions. That’s why we must have structures in place to provide whole person care.”
Mrs May hopes her pledge will buy off her Brexit rebels and scupper Boris Johnson’s leadership ambitions. It almost doubles the extra £350million a week for the NHS the Foreign Secretary has been pressing for – a sum he was ridiculed for pledging on the side of his Brexit battlebus.
Labour’s plan would be financed by tax rises on business and the top five per cent of income earners on more than £80,000 a year.
But the Tories are coy about how they’ll pay for their proposals. That won’t be announced until the Autumn Budget.
They claim there will be a “Brexit dividend”, but stealth taxes such as freezing personal allowances and the 40 per cent top rate to draw more people into tax are on the cards.
There will still be a shortfall, so Chancellor Philip Hammond will have to borrow another £10billion to pay for Mrs May’s NHS 70th anniversary gift.
Doctors are to be asked to design a new 10-year plan for the service. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “This long-term plan and historic funding boost is a fitting birthday present for our most loved institution. It presents a big opportunity for the NHS to write an entirely new chapter in its history.” But Mr Ashworth countered: “There’s a lot of talk about Jeremy Hunt being the longest serving Health Secretary. But the issue is not his survival. It’s the survival of the NHS. It is reliant on the professionalism of its staff, but Tory austerity has taken its toll.”
Four million patients have had to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent ops, and at the current rate that will rise to five million over the next four years.
The 2.5 million who miss the four hour A&E target will grow to nearly four million by 2022 – and the number forced to wait on trolleys is rising at a rate of 50,000 a year.
Labour are also planning reforms which would see the creeping privatisation of the NHS squeezed out.
Mr Ashworth said: “It creates poor quality care for patients and isn’t in the interests of taxpayers. We have seen cancer patients waiting for chemo left stranded on their doorsteps.”
Just £25billion was spent on healthcare