Chancellor urged to increase health spending

The British Medical Association (BMA) has written to Chancellor Philip Hammond ahead of his Spring Budget urging him to match UK spending on health to the average for Europe’s leading economies.

BMA council chair Mark Porter has said that matching the health funding of other leading economies, which is 10.4 per cent of GDP, compared to the UK;’s 9.8 per cent, could help fund the recruitment of thousands more GPs and hospital beds.

Analysis shows that spending in 2015 would have been £10.3 billion higher in the UK had the levels matched, with the BMA sang that the extra finance could have paid for 35,000 more hospital beds, with £3 billion of it allocated to funding an increase of around 10,000 GPs with their associated staff and premises costs.

Porter wrote in his letter: “The crisis facing the NHS and social care is well known and becoming increasingly severe – the government cannot remain a bystander any longer. An entire system under such strain is not due to frontline financial mismanagement, or individual chief executives’ poor decision making, it is due to the conscious underinvestment in our health service.

“Our members report that services are truly at breaking point, with unprecedented rising patient demand met only with financial restraint and directives for the NHS and social care to make huge, unachievable savings through sustainability and transformation plans across England. We are not calling for more than other comparable nations, we are simply calling for you to match the average spending of other leading European economies.”