Theresa May has come under pressure to justify how a so-called Brexit dividend could help pay for a planned £20bn annual funding rise for the NHS, as her announcement on extra health spending was met with scepticism.
The prime minister told the BBC the government’s 10-year spending plan for the health service in England – which she will formally unveil today – would involve “significantly more money going into the NHS”.
She told Andrew Marr yesterday morning: “What we’re doing is saying very clearly as a government that the NHS is our priority. And it’s right, because the NHS matters to people.
“We have looked carefully at what we have put into the NHS to ensure that we deliver world-class healthcare.”
But May’s assertion that the rise could be partly paid for with money saved by the ending of EU contributions after Brexit was dismissed by Sarah Wollaston, the influential Conservative backbencher who chairs the Commons health and social care committee.
“The Brexit dividend tosh was expected but treats the public as fools,” she tweeted. “Sad to see government slide to populist arguments rather than evidence on such an important issue. This will make it harder to have a rational debate about the ‘who & how’ of funding and sharing this fairly.”
In another tweet, Wollaston said the planned 3.4% real-terms increase over the period was welcome but “will not deliver as planned” without increases in preventive health measures, social care, training and capital budgets.
Speaking to Marr, May was vague on how the funding increase would be paid for, saying only that it would be financed from the country “contributing a bit more” and a boost to public finances from Brexit – something the government’s official forecasts say will not happen.
But the PM insisted there would be extra money after Brexit. “At the moment, as a member of the European Union, every year we spend significant amounts of money on our subscription, if you like, to the EU. “When we leave we won’t be doing that. It’s right that we use that money to spend on our priorities and the NHS is our number one priority.”
The argument contradicts official forecasts, which predict that leaving the EU will weaken the public finances, at least in the short term. EU contributions until 2022 have already been earmarked, either to keep paying into Brussels budgets or to replace this spending elsewhere.
She also faced pressure about the amount of the increase, which May said would be a 3.4% real-terms average rise over the first period, up to 2023-24. This is lower than the historic 3.7% rise, and less than the 5% that the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says is needed for real progress.
May said some improvements would come from efficiencies, and claimed too much of the NHS budget increases under Labour governments were spent on non-clinical care. “We need to make sure that the money we put in is being spent on delivering for patients,” she said.
To pay for the rise, May said the UK would be “contributing more as a country”, but gave no details as to whether this would be higher taxes or more borrowing. “The chancellor will announce the details in due course, and before the spending review but there are many aspects that will change over the next few months, potentially,” she said.
The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, expressed scepticism about the plan, saying people would not be fooled.
Thornberry told Marr: “I’d certainly welcome it if we could believe it (but) how are they going to pay for it? They say that they’re going to increase taxes, but we’ve yet to hear who is going to get their taxes increased and how. They say they’re going to increase borrowing but they haven’t said by how much, and they haven’t told us what the effect will be.
“They’ve told us they’re going to pay for it from a Brexit dividend. We don’t really know what that means because we don’t know what the deal is going to be and what the overall effect on the economy is going to be, and actually whether Brexit is going to end up costing us a great deal of money.”
Thornberry also noted that the new plan did not include extra spending on social care. “You can’t talk about just the NHS. You can’t have the NHS without social care. Anyone who has an elderly relative or is elderly themselves knows that.”
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