PM told NHS in England cannot cope without more funds

Boris Johnson has been warned not to pursue a “have our cake and eat it” policy of thinking it can deliver Covid care within existing budgets.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said the additional £20.5bn that was pledged to the NHS in 2018 was no longer enough to deal with the additional pressures the pandemic had brought to the health service.

Mr Hopson went on to say “I recognise the pressures on public expenditure. But we have to avoid what the prime minister calls his ‘have our cake and eat it’ approach and pretend the NHS can cope with all these pressures on its current budget – it can’t.”

In 2018, then Prime Minister Theresa May, pledged annual rises of 3.4 per cent until 2023-24. However, Hopson stressed that that came after “the NHS had been through a near-decade of the longest and deepest financial squeeze in its history”.

Mr Hopson, addressing a virtual gathering of hundreds of hospital chiefs, said “Having driven social care into crisis by failing to fund it properly and sustainably, we must avoid driving the NHS into a similar fate. And we must rescue social care from its current state of crisis.”

The Health Foundations’s director of research Anita Charlesworth, said the pandemic meant that the service now needed “many more billions” than planned.

“ Covid puts pressure on capacity, and the NHS will need more staff, more facilities and investment in public health. None of this will come cheap. For those reasons the NHS will need many billions more than currently planned in order to do everything that ministers and the public expect it to do.”

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