Now cut foreign aid to save the stricken NHS
EXCLUSIVE In first major poll of A&E winter crisis, 78% of voters say: Enough is enough
VOTERS have demanded Britain’s bloated foreign aid budget should be slashed so the crisis-ridden NHS can be given the billions of pounds it desperately needs.
More than three-quarters want to divert the flood of cash sent overseas so it can fund hospitals struggling to cope with the worst crisis for 15 years.
The finding comes in an exclusive poll for The Mail on Sunday – the first taken during the crisis gripping the NHS – which reveals that:
An overwhelming 78 per cent of voters want cuts to Britain’s wasteful £12.4billion annual aid budget, and the money diverted to the Health Service instead;
About four in five think patients should have to show ID at casualty to prevent abuse of the NHS by those who are not entitled to use it;
A similar number support fining drunks who clog up A&E £50 a time;
The majority want a law forcing doctors to open their surgeries at evenings and weekends – showing support for the ‘seven-day GP’ proposals unveiled by the Prime Minister this weekend;
More trust Theresa May with the NHS than Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, despite criticism that the Prime Minister is not taking the winter crisis seriously enough.
Pollsters at Survation quizzed almost 1,200 people on Friday, after a blizzard of warnings, statistics and reports highlighting the dire state of the NHS – and a sustained campaign by The Mail on Sunday about waste in Britain’s aid budget.
Last week, it emerged that hospitals were asking relatives to nurse their loved ones back to health at home, as they had run out of space. In the first week of January, almost 18,500 patients had to endure waits on A&E trolleys as there were no free beds.
The Royal College of Physicians said lives were being put at risk in ‘over-full hospitals’, only days after The Mail on Sunday exposed how many of them were repeatedly at 100 per cent capacity in December. Against this backdrop, our poll asked which areas of public spending should be cut to boost the NHS. The majority opposed boosting cuts to seven areas, including education, defence and welfare, but 78 per cent said they would slash overseas aid.
If a tenth of the aid budget was diverted to the NHS, the £1.24 billion would pay for around three million stays in a hospital bed, which cost £400 a night, or almost 11million A&E visits, which average £114. Last night, Shipley Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘The public has a damn sight more common sense than most Westminster politicians do.
‘It’s ridiculous we are even having this debate. It is so blindingly obvious we should be cutting the overseas aid budget. Vulnerable, elderly and disabled people at home should be our top priority.’
Last week, the British Red Cross claimed NHS hospitals were facing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ – a claim many said was exaggerated.
Despite austerity cuts to almost all departments since 2010, the aid budget has kept rising, thanks to a pledge by David Cameron to commit 0.7 per cent of national income to it. The figure is enshrined in law, and on leaving office last summer, Mr Cameron said it was one of his proudest achievements.
But this newspaper has campaigned against the targets after highlighting waste caused by officials racing to spend billions.
Examples include £285 million blown on an airport on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena, where strong winds make it too dangerous for commercial jets to land.
NHS budgets are, of course, much larger – £120.6billion in England, £10.2billion in Scotland, £7billion in Wales, including social care, and a similar sum in Northern Ireland.
But while NHS budgets are being increased in cash terms year after year, soaring demand from Britain’s growing and ageing population means the NHS in England faces a £22 billion budget black hole by 2020 unless radical ‘efficiency savings’ are made, according to official forecasts. In the meantime, the service is coming under ever greater strain. Our poll suggests support for radical measures to cut demand in A&Es. More than threequarters (77 per cent) think free care should be reserved for UK citizens, by requiring patients to show ID. Monmouth Tory MP David Davies said: ‘The NHS spends a great deal on people who should not be in the country. The money it costs to treat them could come from the foreign aid budget.’
Seventy-nine per cent back a £50 charge for people who end up in A&E because they have drunk too.
Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth would not be drawn on whether he supported cutting foreign aid to shore up the NHS and declined to comment on the public’s lack of trust in Mr Corbyn on the issue. Instead, he attacked Mrs May’s ‘floundering incompetence’.
It would not be the first time foreign aid funds were channelled elsewhere. Last year, International Development Secretary Priti Patel quietly approved a plan to divert millions to help the war on terror.
Downing Street said last night: ‘The Government has clearly prioritised funding our NHS, which will receive over half a trillion pounds over this Parliament.
‘The aid budget is an investment in our future security and national interest. That is why we have targeted aid spending to deliver tangible results that build a safer, more prosperous world for the UK.’
‘Public has more sense than politicians’
BEFORE we can tackle the problems of the NHS, we have to stop worshipping it. Lord Lawson, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, ruefully said that the Health Service was ‘the nearest thing the British people now have to a religion’.
He was distressed by the way the health system ate up his Budget, and also by the way in which – however much the Tories spent on it – the Labour Party claimed to be the sole guardian and saviour of a beloved national institution.
The Mail on Sunday’s Survation poll today suggests that, in the public mind, common sense is beginning to take over from unthinking adulation – and also to displace the absurd belief that the NHS belongs only to Labour and the SNP.
The British public has concluded that Labour did not save the NHS during its ill-organised spending splurge in the Blair era, and that money is not the only issue.
People have also noticed the disastrous effect on the budget of the Government’s needless and self-satisfied pledge to spend – by law – 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income on foreign aid.
Asked where the money should come from to repair the gaps in our health system, voters overwhelmingly choose foreign aid as the area which can best be trimmed.
They recognise that aid is necessary and good, but that spending to meet a target is bound to mean waste and worse.
But what they also see is that many people misuse the medical skill to which they get access, free at the point of use.
In an extraordinary finding, it turns out that more people now blame mass immigration for NHS failings than blame the level of Government funding, an enormous and significant shift which the Labour Party will not be pleased to see.
The outlines of a new policy clearly show in the ideas the public now support in large numbers: charges for drunks who abuse A&E; identity checks to screen out health tourists; means tests for nonessential treatments such as cosmetic and obesity surgery. Longer opening hours for GP surgeries are also extremely popular.
Some of these ideas are more practical than others. Others could be made practical with some thought and effort.
It is clear there is an opportunity here for a determined Government to act, with strong popular support, to place sensible limits on what a national health system can do, without ceasing to be fair and generous to those who need it most.
There has never been a better time for such action. Labour, by choosing Jeremy Corbyn as their leader, have driven themselves to the margins of every major argument including this one, and can no longer gain much by shrill, false claims that the Tories seek to dismantle or privatise the NHS.
Millions of minds are open, for the first time in many years, to thoughtful changes in the tasks the NHS is willing to take on.
Most reasonable people can see the distinction between tattoo removal or obesity treatment and a child in need of an emergency operation.
And most GPs can also see that there is a crisis in the management of surgeries, which is – among other things – leading to dangerous pressure on A&E departments.
The Prime Minister plainly appreciates common sense and workable solutions. A better, more sensible NHS, right now, would be good for Britain and good politics too.