George Osborne to pledge extra £2bn for NHS

[Northerner]

Chancellor George Osborne is to announce an extra £2bn for the health service across the UK next year.

Mr Osborne will use his Autumn Statement on Wednesday to announce the extra funding for frontline services.

The government can pay for it because of the "growing" economy and its "tight control" of finances, he will say.

Labour blamed the Conservatives for the NHS's "fragile" finances, saying it would "rescue" it with a £2.5bn-a-year fund, on top of Tory spending plans.

Mr Osborne's pledge comes after NHS bosses warned of a need for extra funds to keep the NHS going and maintain standards of care.

They along with analysts had said £2bn extra was needed to cope with the immediate, unprecedented pressure on NHS budgets.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30265833

Is there an election coming up soon? 🙄 I'd suggest that, rather tan it being down to the 'strong' economy, it might be down to the fact he's about to get £2bn from the bank fines...

 

[Northerner]

Interesting comment from the Guardian website, by someone within the NHS:

It would be good news if this were new money. It isn't.
The majority of the 1.1bn has already been announced and a lot of that is earmarked for things like the parity of esteem agenda, and is 'included in the baseline' (essentially it's money we, as commissioners already had, that we're now being told we have to spend on specific things we didn't have to spend it on before).
And as the article points out, the majority of the 'new' £2bn investment will simply be moving money from central budgets where it has been 'saved' (i.e. cut) and putting it into local budgets. Off the top of my head, I'd imagine a huge chunk of this will come from Specialised Commissioning and will simply be money that was previously top-sliced from the budget being given back to CCGs, who will also end up having to commission these high-cost services themselves meaning there'll be no actual new money.
Of course, all this smoke and mirrors produces the headline 'Tories invest £3.1bn to save health services' in an attempt to buy back the public's trust in the Conservatives ability to run the health service and I doubt it'll be successful anyway.

It's beginning to look a bit like that EU bill we got for £1.7bn, which Osborne claimed to have halved, then it turns out it was never going to be higher than what he claimed as his triumph! 🙄 I am getting so sick of hearing politicians spouting such deceptive nonsense.

 

[trophywench]

Always 'Jam tomorrow!' Alan, never 'Jam today' ! 🙂

 

[Northerner]

Always 'Jam tomorrow!' Alan, never 'Jam today' ! 🙂

They haven't even got any strawberries they can plant! 🙄

 

[Northerner]

Autumn Statement:George Osborne accused of ‘fiddling the figures’ over extra NHS cash

George Osborne was today accused of fiddling the figures after it emerged that a third of the Government’s extra investment in the NHS will be money that has already been allocated to the Department of Health.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Osborne said he would use Wednesday’s Autumn Statement to set out plans to provide an additional £2bn a year for frontline NHS services from next April.

He also announced that a further £1bn in banking fines would be spent over the next four years to improve and update GP surgeries so they relieve some of the pressure on hospital services.

But what the Chancellor did not mention was that the £2bn investment included £700m that had already been allocated by the Treasury to the Department of Health.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-the-figures-over-extra-nhs-cash-9894200.html

I thought Chancellors were supposed to be good at sums? 🙄