Why should the NHS be protected from spending cuts?

The new Prime Minister has said this week that NHS funding will be ‘prioritised’ when it comes to spending decisions, while NHS bosses seek up to £7 billion in extra funding. That is wrong.

In 2000, government health expenditure in the UK was equivalent to about 14 per cent of total public spending. By 2009, as the Labour government came to its end, that had risen to 16 per cent. Then came the period of Tory austerity, from 2010 onwards. Other departments were cut dramatically, but the NHS was ringfenced and NHS expenditure continued to rise. Total health expenditure reached the equivalent of 17 per cent of public spending by 2013, 18 per cent by 2018 and 19 per cent by 2019, an inexorable ratchet. (And this is setting aside the huge spikes during the pandemic.) 

But why? If we want spending to be cut, we should surely want to cut it in the areas where it has expanded the most and expanded the most recently, rather than asking other departments to face real-term cuts that set their budgets back decades (as happened during the post-2010 austerity period).