Chancellor Philip Hammond has declared that there is no crisis in the NHS and there are no unemployed in Britain. All is rosy in the garden, in the eyes of the man who is to deliver the nation’s Budget on Wednesday.
Hammond told BBC’s Andrew Marr that the Budget would reject the growing calls from health experts for an emergency injection of £4bn to avert a crisis in the NHS. Those running public services – the nurses, doctors, teachers, police and firemen – always predict “Armageddon” before a Budget, he said.
Simon Stevens, the NHS England chief executive, called for the £4bn last week but the Chancellor sought to turn the problem onto Stevens by saying the NHS boss had not delivered on a pledge that he would turn around the NHS if the service received an extra £10b by 2020.
Tory politicians are increasingly targeting Stevens rather than his boss, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, as the man who will shoulder the blame for the widely anticipated failings of the NHS this winter.
Scapegoat
Prime Minister Theresa May has already told Stevens (below) that she will hold him personally responsible for ensuring the health service does not end up in a crisis this winter. In September, she warned the senior civil servant, a former Labour Party local councillor who was appointed by David Cameron to run the NHS, that he would be held accountable for how well hospitals and GP services in the country cope through the winter.
“The Prime Minister made it very clear that Simon Stevens was personally responsible for and accountable for the NHS’s performance this winter,” a source said. “There was a long pause, as the enormity of this sunk in. He had to accept it because she was making it clear that he was in charge of winter.”
Hammond told Marr that he would not dispute the fact that the NHS was under pressure. “We have been doing some very careful work with the Department of Health, with the NHS, to look at where those pressures are, to look at the capital needs of the NHS, to look at where the particular pressure points around targets are”, he said. “And we will seek to address those in a sensible and measured and balanced way.”
The idea that the NHS has already received what it requested has been disputed by Stevens, who said earlier this month that the suggestion was simply not true. “As I have told Parliament on many occasions, for the next three years we did not get the funding the NHS had requested. So 2018, which happens to be the 70th anniversary of the NHS, is poised to be the toughest financial year. The turnaround plan was also based on the Government sorting out the crisis in social care, which has not happened.”
Different Priorities
Health care has been ranked by the public as its top priority for the Budget but Hammond plans to concentrate instead on house building, with measures to encourage 300,000 new homes a year. His housing proposals have also met with disappointment after he said it could be done without building on the green belt or “pouring money in” to the problem. He has failed to explain where or when they would be built.
Opposition parties dismissed the Chancellor’s promises as “derisory” and unable to stimulate house building after Hammond suggested his targets could be reached mostly by changes the planning system. Hammond then provoked further anger by telling Marr that “there are no unemployed people” in the UK.
The Chancellor made the gaffe while asserting the country was on the up following a long economic downturn. “Where are all these unemployed people? There are no unemployed people,” he said, prompting a flurry of incredulous responses on Twitter.
When it was pointed out that there are in fact 1.4m people out of work in Britain Hammond said he had been referring to the fact that unemployment is at a record low. He accused the last Labour Government of “abandoning” the jobless and said May’s Government was “helping people get back into work”.
Jon Trickett, Labour’s Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, said Hammond was “living on another planet”.
by Bob Graham
The post Politics: Hammond: It’s The NHS’s Fault appeared first on Felix Magazine.
Politics: Hammond: It’s The NHS’s Fault posted first on http://www.felixmagazine.com/
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