Labour NHS spending plans ‘tighter than Cameron’s austerity’

  • Post last modified:June 16, 2024
  • Reading time:10 mins read


In the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has been trying to paint itself as an NHS saviour following years of Tory punishment. A new study from the Nuffield Trust, however, has exposed that Labour’s plan is “tighter even than the coalition government’s “austerity” period”.

Given that many voters were hoping Labour might fix things, the reaction has not been positive:

Demonstrably austerity

The Nuffield Trust note that the Conservative Party, Labour, and Lib Dems have all been less than transparent on their plans:

With election manifestos from the three largest parties in England now published, the electorate, not unreasonably, would like to know how the parties compare on funding the NHS.

Sadly, none of the parties have thus far chosen to be transparent on this matter. Instead, each has published costings documents alongside their manifestos purporting to set out planned “extra” funding for health and social care by 2028/29, but without any information on the baseline spending level this “extra” would come on top of.

To help inform the election debate, we have tried to fill this void with some informed assumptions to allow like-for-like comparisons.

Perhaps Labour will complain that the Nuffield Trust misrepresented them. If they do, that’s really their own fault for not being transparent in the first place.

The Nuffield Trust continues:

Our core assumption is that all three parties accept as their baseline that total spending by the Department of Health and Social Care will increase by at least a real terms 0.8% each year between 2024/25 and 2028/29.

That figure stems from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s base case for the next Parliament which assumes day-to-day spending across all government departments increases by a real terms 1% each year, while capital spending (on longer-term investments such as buildings and equipment) is frozen in cash terms.

Applied to the DHSC, that assumption results in real terms annual increases of 0.8%, and forms the funding baseline, on top of which we can compare each party’s pledged “extra”.

It is worth noting that without this assumption, the “extra” spending by 2028/29 pledged by each of the three largest parties would be insufficient to allow NHS spending to keep up with inflation. We have discounted that as a possibility, because it is both implausible and also at odds with the explicit statement in at least one manifesto (the Conservatives’) that funding will increase at above-inflation levels.

Next we get to the section which is causing a problem for supporters who want to believe the hype:

Applying the listed “extra” spending pledged by each party to a real terms base case for total health spending annual growth of 0.8% would result in the next four years being the tightest in NHS history under the Conservative and Labour pledges – tighter even than the coalition government’s “austerity” period, which saw funding grow by just 1.4% real terms a year between 2010/11 and 2014/15.

The Liberal Democrats’ pledge on health spending would take real terms annual increases marginally higher than the austerity low point, with average increases of 1.5%, while the Conservatives would offer annual increases of 0.9%, and Labour would offer 1.1% per year.

That’s right – Labour’s plan – as far as we can tell – would mean less investment than the David Cameron years – i.e. the period which truly fucked the NHS:

Labour’s referendum on reality

Starmer is claiming that he will not return the country to austerity:

Arguably, of course, we never left austerity. The cuts haven’t been as bad as those made in the Cameron years, but there was no return to the barely-adequate spending of old – we’ve just limped onwards. In that sense, Starmer is correct that his plans won’t return us to austerity; they’ll simply sustain the austerity we already have.

Either way, people are having an extremely negative reaction to Labour’s barefaced austerity proposals:

 

The below video demonstrates that Labour is literally repeating the Cameron-led austerity drive word for word:

Despite the stark reality of their own figures, Labour is campaigning on being pro-NHS and anti-austerity:

Given this, you could forgive people for believing that Labour is pro-NHS and anti-austerity.

It isn’t, though.

And it’s clear to anyone who pays the least bit of attention.

Meet the new boss

The more people see of Starmer and his party, the more obvious the deception becomes:

It’s understandable that people want to vote the Tories out in the upcoming election.

For those who vote Labour, however, just do so understanding that a vote for them is a vote for austerity.

Featured image via Sky News





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