“I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”, declared the Conservatives’ memorable poster of David Cameron at the last election. But today, as he prepares to deliver his Autumn Statement at 12:30pm, George Osborne stands accused of doing the reverse: cutting the NHS, not the deficit.
With exquisite timing, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Andrew Dilnot, has written to the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, challenging his claim that spending on the NHS has risen in real terms “in each of the last two years”. In response to a complaint from the shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, Dilnot concludes that, contrary to recent Conservative statements, “expenditure on the NHS in real terms was lower in 2011-12 than it was in 2009-10”. The most recent Treasury figures show that while real terms spending rose by 0.09 per cent between 2010-11 and 2011-12, it fell by 0.84 per cent between 2009-10 and 2010-11. In other words, Hunt is wrong to claim that the NHS has received real-terms increases “in each of the last two years”.
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