Labour will pay for the state of the NHS

By Simon Wilson Jan 25, 2006

Simon Wilson

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Even by the standards of the National Health Service, “accustomed to tales of woe”, it has been a grim week, says Jeremy Laurance in The Independent.

Bleak headlines have dominated the press, exposing the shortcomings in the finances of the health service and putting forward “gloomy predictions of the spiralling cost of one of its most high-profile projects”. More than a thousand doctors wrote to The Times petitioning the Government to scrap a review into the £1.2bn privately financed scheme to rebuild St. Bartholomew’s and Royal London hospitals.

But that wasn’t the only worry for the health secretary this week. It was also announced that the NHS is going to have to cut back its spending in face of its £620m deficit – “which could reach £1bn by the end of this financial year”, says George Jones in The Daily Telegraph. In the run up to the election, “ministers ordered NHS managers to hit the Government’s targets… at all costs”, says Laurance, but now the bills for this have come in, and with them has come the “inevitable pain”. One in four NHS trusts are now forecast to be in deficit by the end of the year.

Health spending has doubled since 1997, says Andrew Lansley, the Conservative health spokesman in The Daily Telegraph, so at this point it does seem fair to ask where on earth all the money has gone. The answer isn’t an encouraging one. Half of the increase has gone to doctors’ and nurses’ salaries – our doctors are now the second-highest paid in the world – but much of the rest of the money seems to be unaccounted for.

However, you look at it, the fact is that too much has been spent to deliver too little, and although seeking economies now is no bad thing, it is “very late in the day”, says The Times. The cost of the squandered investment will be borne by patients and, electorally, in the end by the Labour Party.

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Published in Economics | More articles by Simon Wilson

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