NHS to remain a ‘top priority’ with promise of fresh £1.8bn boost
BORIS JOHNSON is to announce a £1.8billion boost for the NHS, as he pledges that the health service will be a “top priority” for his administration.
The Prime Minister is expected to reveal substantial new funding to finance building work, beds and equipment, along with “vital” upgrades for 20 hospitals. It comes on top of Theresa May’s £20billion long-term funding settlement for the health service.
The announcement, which is due to take place on a visit to a hospital tomorrow, follows Mr Johnson’s pledge in his first speech as Prime Minister to begin work on hospital upgrades and ensure that funding reaches the front line.
Government sources said the cash agreed with Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, marked the start of delivering on that pledge. But they declined to spell out how it would be funded, other than to cite the Conservatives’ “fiscal responsibility” since 2010.
A source said: “The Prime Minister has been clear since day one that the NHS is a top priority. This money will be felt by front-line services, by the doctors and nurses whose hard work is invaluable and by the patients that they care for.”
The new funding is understood to comprise £1billion in capital spending for buildings and equipment, and £850million for upgrades to 20 hospitals across the country.
Vote Leave, the official pro-Brexit
‘This money will be felt by front-line services, by the doctors and nurses whose hard work is invaluable and by the patients’
group fronted by Mr Johnson and Michael Gove, made greater NHS funding a key demand of its campaign.
Mr Johnson has stood by its claims that by leaving the EU the UK would be taking back control of £350million each week, which he has said should be spent on the NHS.
“It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS, provided we use that cash injection to modernise and make the most of new technology,” Mr Johnson wrote in The Daily Telegraph in September 2017.
In his Commons statement the day after he entered Downing Street, Mr Johnson suggested that the funding for the 20 hospitals would come from the money “promised by the last Government in June 2018”.
But sources said that the £1.8billion expected to be announced by Mr Johnson represented additional cash on top of the long-term agreement signed off by Mrs May.
On June 17, Mrs May announced that the NHS in England would receive an extra £20billion a year by 2023 as a 70th “birthday present” – an average rise of 3.4 per cent in the health service’s budget.
The then prime minister, who was battling to win support from Brexiteers for her exit plan from the EU, appeared to adopt the spirit of Vote Leave’s demand by suggesting that the rise was possible partly because “we will have that sum of money that is available from the European Union”.