Another reminder of how the Tories have failed the NHS

All you need to know about the desperate state of our National Health Service and how it got there is contained in the first line of the latest analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It reads: “NHS spending has risen less quickly than was planned at the last election, despite the pandemic and record waiting lists.”

Those 20 words speak volumes.

When Boris Johnson campaigned in the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party implied that the health budget in England would rise by 3.3% per year in real terms over the lifetime of the current parliament. But now we are on track for just a 2.7% rise, with any additional cash for the NHS more than absorbed by the high inflation the country has been experiencing.

This, as the IFS explains, “breaks the habit of a lifetime”. Over the last 40 years, the budget of the NHS has always grown more quickly than planned. Now it is not even growing as quickly as the long-term average.

And that has somehow been allowed to happen even when there was a global pandemic that cost billions to deal with and as waiting lists swell to record highs.

This lacklustre government has, of course, been hoist by its own petard. The weak growth it has presided over – and part of the reason for that is Brexit – means there is less money to go around.

And because the pie is smaller, it means that the NHS is taking up a greater share of GDP than before just to secure below-average rates of growth in the health budget.

Remember the Tory press was only boasting last month that Brexit had been vindicated because it was providing record levels of funding for the NHS? Here is the hard proof that that was utter tosh.

And there is worse to come. Current government plans mean no increase in spending on the NHS, in real terms, both this year and next. That hasn’t happened since the 1950s.

The chancellor and the government could do something about that by the end of this parliament if they wanted to.

Instead they are talking about cuts to National Insurance, which is what pays for the NHS. This is fantasy economic

Yet as Mark Warner the author of this report warns, “Spending on the health service will – absent a big reduction in the role of the NHS, or further deterioration in quality – have to rise in real terms.”

That is one set of priorities you can trust the Conservatives to deliver. Under them, the NHS will get smaller, or get worse – or probably both.