Claim
Labour has pledged to put an extra £26bn – over and above inflation – into the NHS in England by 2023-24 if it forms the next government. The party claims its plans for the NHS would deliver the “world-class health service we all need”.
Background
NHS funding has been a key political battleground since 2010, when the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition limited the NHS to annual rises of just over 1%, far below the 3.7% increases it received on average between its creation in 1948 and 2010. That ended in April, when the NHS’s budget rose by 3.4% after Theresa May’s pledge last year to give the service an extra £20.5bn by 2023-24.
The NHS has emerged as the main domestic issue of the election campaign so far, mainly because Labour has consistently claimed that a post-Brexit US trade deal would allow the NHS to be put “up for sale” to US healthcare firms and its drugs bill to soar from £18bn to £45bn, which the government denies.
The £26bn would come from reversing cuts in corporation tax and raising taxes for the wealthy. It would see NHS England’s budget rising to £154.9bn by 2023-24 and the income of the Department of Health and Social Care – which gives the NHS its money – reach £178bn in that year.
Crucially, Labour would give the NHS about £5.5bn a year more by 2023-24 than the Conservatives, because it is pledging to increase its budget by 4.3% compared with the 3.4% planned by the Tories.
Reality
Labour’s NHS plans are more comprehensive than those set out so far by the government. That is, they also include specific sums for capital spending (which funds repairs, building new NHS premises and buying new equipment such as scanners), public health and moves to boost the service’s workforce, such as by bringing back bursaries for student nurses. However, they would be paid for out of the chunk of the DHSC’s budget which does not go to the NHS, not the £26bn. Labour would apply the 4.3% rise to the whole DHSC budget.
In contrast, the Tories have so far only set out by how much the NHS’s budget would rise, not the DHSC’s. And while they have announced £2.7bn to build six new hospitals, they have not yet said how much they will put into capital, public health or workforce training by 2023-24.
Verdict
It is unclear that if even increasing health spending by this much will be enough to deliver all the improvements Labour is seeking. But their “£26bn more for the NHS” offer is “more generous” than the Conservative one because their plans are more wide-ranging, the independent thinktank the King’s Fund says.
