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.
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