The Labour party today pledged to end the Tory NHS crisis with a £26bn real terms healthcare funding boost to provide safe quality care, recruit the thousands of staff needed, rebuild crumbling facilities and provide modern state of the art equipment. This is over £6bn in real terms more than the funding announced by the Tories last year.
Labour’s rescue plan includes NHS capital expenditure rising to the international average, £1 billion a year training and education budgets and £1 billion more to fund a major expansion of public health services, with a focused drive on prevention measures to stop people getting sick as part of Labour’s mission to tackle health inequalities and prioritise children’s health and wellbeing.
The funding plan comes as experts warn the NHS is heading into one of the worst winters ever with hospitals already reporting ‘black alerts’ with heart-breaking scenes of patients, often elderly, languishing on trolleys.
The number of people waiting longer for urgent cancer treatment has tripled under the Tories – and the terrible impact of cuts on waiting lists is visible here in the East of England.
To ensure quality care across both physical and mental health, Labour’s NHS Rescue Plan will mean:
• Increasing the total Department of Health and Social Care budget to £178bn in 2023-24 – an average annual increase of 4.3%
• Increasing the NHS England resource budget to £154.9 billion in 2023-24 to restore constitutional standards on waiting times and access, including ensuring 95 per cent of patients are treated within 18 weeks, improve A&E performance and radically improve cancer survival rates;
• This will mean a real terms increase of £26bn for day-to-day NHS spending from 2018-19 to 2023-24 – the period over which the Conservatives have promised £20bn
• Guarantee a greater priority for mental health and wellbeing than ever before with an extra £1.6 billion NHS spending per year to fund counselling services for schools, community mental health hubs for young people, invest in community services for severe mental illness and ensure high quality liaison and 24/7 crisis care for people living with poor mental health;
• Free prescriptions and car parking, the costs of which are not included in these figures.
• Protecting the NHS from Boris Johnson’s sell out Brexit deal with Donald Trump which risks funneling £500 million per week out of the NHS to big drugs companies
To rebuild the NHS, Labour’s NHS Rescue Plan will:
• Increase NHS capital budgets by £15 billion over a Parliament to rebuild NHS hospitals and community facilities and clear the maintenance backlog, funded from Labour’s Social Transformation Fund;
• Deliver a Green New Deal for our NHS so every trust can to reduce its carbon footprint can get it;
• Provide a new £2 billion strategic mental health infrastructure fund to abolish dormitory wards and make every inpatient setting safe for patients, invest in more beds to end out of area placements and roll out a fleet of crisis ambulances;
• Invest an extra £2.5 billion to overhaul the primary care estate so that GPs can deliver better local care in their communities;
• Provide an extra £1.5 billion to increase the numbers of CT and MRI scanners to the OECD average to radically improve diagnostic capacity and improve cancer outcomes;
• Invest further in digital, AI and to ensure transformation of services for the future.
For NHS staff Labour’s NHS Rescue Plan will:
• Invest £1 billion in restoring a training bursary for nurses and Continuing Professional Development to help recruit 24,000 extra nurses as well as extra midwives and allied health professionals;
• Expand GP training places to 5000 to create 27 million more appointments with family doctors;
• Invest in mental health support for NHS staff.
• For Public Health Services Labour’s NHS Rescue Plan will:
• Deliver a £1 billion increase in the annual Public Health budget including an extra £100 million for addiction services, an extra £100 million for obesity services, an extra £100 million for public mental health services, £75 million for sexual health services, an extra £75 million for 0-5 services and more investment in smoking cessation services;
• Invest in the public health nurse workforce delivering an extra 4,800 health visitors and school nurses.