Unhealthy spending

Since the Budget, economists have pointed out that Britain is turning into a health service with a government attached. The NHS was protected from what Philip Hammond calls ‘austerity’, yet it has emerged as the big winner from his abandonment of the old Tory idea that government should live within its means. The plan is for more debt, more spending, more tax and a lot more NHS. At the start of the last decade, the NHS accounted for 23 per cent of government spending on public services: this figure is now set to rise to 39 per cent. And then, no doubt, further still.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, will soon run an organisation that has more people and money than some European Union countries. Meanwhile, the budgets of many other government departments are to be frozen or even cut. The Home Office and Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will each lose £100 million — as will, bizarrely in the year in which we will leave the European Union, the Department for International Trade.