How to make £8bn cut a vote winner

THE story of how the Tories turned an £8billion NHS cut into a £8billion vote winning NHS ‘Election bonanza’ is a classic political fix, writes Simon Walters.

In late 2014, Downing Street was alarmed by reports the NHS was going bust.

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens, a smooth Whitehall operator feted by Tony Blair and David Cameron alike, told No 10 the health service would face an annual £30billion shortfall by 2020 and needed at least £15billion to £16billion extra per year to fill it; with the rest met by efficiency savings – at a stretch.

And he planned to say this in a public report on NHS funding. Downing Street was prepared to buy off Labour attacks on their NHS record – but not for £16 billion.

According to David Laws, Stevens was told to halve the figure – or be rubbished as a wild spendthrift. Downing Street and Stevens deny it.

When his report was published on October 23, 2014, Stevens spelled out the £30billion ‘black hole’, but not how much he was demanding to fill it.

The decision of NHS England to back Downing Street’s £8billion figure with £22billion savings was slipped out via a private briefing to the BBC. When the £8billion sum was put to Stevens in a BBC interview, he said: ‘We think we can do it.’

From that moment on it became gospel: Stevens would settle for £8billion. Cameron seized on it, declaring, in an apparent magnanimous gesture, it was his ‘responsibility’ to give Stevens the £8billion he had asked for.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took up the generous theme, stating: ‘We will back the NHS’s own plan in full. We will give whatever they need. If it needs £8 billion, we will find that.’

In fact, Stevens had said it needed double.