News / Spending review must recognise financial pressures, chancellor told

Additional funding is needed and it needs to be allocated quickly. These were the key messages from representative bodies and health think tanks to the chancellor George Osborne ahead of this month’s spending review.

The government has already promised an additional £8bn for the NHS by 2020, but with providers facing significant deficits this year, there are concerns whether this is enough and about the phasing of increases.

Paul Healy, senior economic advisor at the NHS Confederation, told Healthcare Finance that the review had to provide clarity and stability in funding. ‘By 2017/18 we need to have seen the bulk of this money to allow services to plan ahead. He added that there also needed to be ‘a commitment to fund social care and end counterintuitive cuts to public health’.

In its written submission to the spending review, the King’s Fund said there was a need for emergency deficit funding this year – perhaps up to £1bn. It also stressed that the promised £8bn was the ‘absolute minimum requirement’ and would not pay for new commitments such as seven-day services.

‘It is essential that the money is frontloaded from 2016/17 to avoid an accelerating decline in performance and quality,’ it said.

The King’s Fund repeated calls for a dedicated transformation fund and the need to protect social care budgets. In addition, NHS Providers director of policy and strategy Saffron Cordery called for transformation to be properly resourced.

‘Many of the new care models envisaged by the Five-year forward view may result in substantially better care for patients,’ she said, ‘but these new approaches will also require start-up funding and parallel running costs at a time when the extra £8bn of funding is needed simply to keep the existing NHS show on the road.’

HFMA director of policy and technical, Paul Briddock said the chancellor was well aware of the financial pressures facing the NHS and called on him to recognise these pressures ‘in both the size of future settlements and the timing of any additional funding’.

He added that the new models of care delivery being explored in vanguard sites and elsewhere were ‘the right things to do’ – in terms of delivering the right services to patients and ensuring sustainability of services.

‘We need to give these initiatives the space to pursue these new models and not undermine them by imposing impossible financial demands on them in terms of their day-to-day delivery of services,’ he said.