It would be daft for someone to offer you £1.8 billion and you turn it down. That sort of money isn’t to be sniffed at. This is how much Boris Johnson announced he would give to the NHS as an extra funding boost. And I don’t want to seem churlish or ungrateful — after all, those of us who work in the health service are always banging on about how NHS resources are near breaking point. But I have some reservations.
The first is the most basic — I’m not sure this is quite the cash windfall it’s made out to be. While Boris has assured us that ‘this is £1.8 billion of new money [that] wasn’t there ten days ago’, Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust thinktank, said that the money was actually from hospitals that had accumulated it by making savings in capital expenditure introduced by Theresa May. She said it was ‘the equivalent of giving someone cash then banning them from spending it, only to expect cheers of jubilation when you later decide they can spend it after all’.
But still, wherever it’s come from, it’s better to have it to spend than not. The bigger issue is that despite promises of more money, those on the coalface so rarely get to see it. I never turn up to work after an announcement like this to find an extra nurse or doctor. Dieticians or occupational therapists don’t materialise after a politician tells us we’ll receive more money for the NHS. It’s an ongoing joke at work about where the money actually goes.
I work in mental health, and talking to colleagues from a range of mental health services it seems that despite promises from politicians, we haven’t had an increase in staff or resources.
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