NHS leaders have welcomed the £6bn budget boost Jeremy Hunt handed the beleaguered service to help it meet rising demand, tackle the care backlog and overhaul its antiquated IT system.
The chancellor gave the NHS in England an extra £2.5bn to cover its day-to-day running costs in 2024/25, after the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned on Monday that it was set to receive less funding next year than this.
The top-up means NHS England’s budget next year will be £164.9bn, compared with this year’s £163.2bn, which means Hunt – a former health secretary – should avoid being in the politically awkward position of cutting the budget for the country’s most popular public service.
Julian Hartley, the chief executive of hospital body NHS Providers, said the money would offer “much needed – but temporary – respite” and “some breathing space” from the service’s acute financial difficulties, which have been exacerbated by inflation and the costs incurred by long-running strikes by NHS staff.
But Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the £2.5bn would “scarcely touch the sides … [and] may just about stop things from worsening” for the service.
Hunt also announced another £3.4bn to fund the NHS’s plan to boost its productivity. However, it will be spread over three years and not arrive until 2025/26. Of that, £2bn will be used to modernise what the Treasury called “fragmented and outdated IT systems across the NHS, reducing 13m hours wasted by doctors every year and enabling up to £4bn of savings over five years”.
Another £430m will be spent improving patients’ access to care to help reduce waiting lists and the delays many face in getting treatment through, for example, greater use of the NHS App.
However, there was little to stabilise England’s creaking adult social care system, and Hunt’s budget delivered an ongoing squeeze on resources, said the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services.
“Millions of adults and carers will be disappointed,” said Anna Hemmings, joint chief executive of ADASS. “Directors can’t invest enough in early support for people close to home, which prevents them needing hospital or residential care at a greater cost.”
Age UK, a charity that supports older people, said the picture for social care “remains incredibly bleak”. “On behalf of older people, disabled people and their unpaid carers, we are sad the budget did nothing to address this,” said director Caroline Abrahams.
Hunt recognised there had been market failure in the state relying on private companies to provide children’s residential care, announcing £165m to improve the children’s homes estate to cut back on profiteering.
There was also little to fix the housing crisis, which is posing an increasing risk to public health, after recent official figures showed the number of children in temporary accommodation was up 14% in a year and rough sleeping up by 27%. There was no new money to build the 90,000 new social homes that the National Housing Federation believes are needed each year to meet demand.
There was a cut from 27% to 24% on capital gains tax for landlords when they sell their properties, but housing campaigners said this could result in thousands of renters being made homeless as more landlords sell up.
