NHS short of over £1bn for Covid second wave

The NHS has been given in excess of £1 billion less than it needs to tackle the second wave of coronavirus, deal with the coming winter and restart routine operations.

The Guardian has reported that hospitals across England face holes in their budget for the rest of the year of up to £20 million, which they say is hampering their efforts to prepare properly for the service’s annual winter crisis and get back to pre-pandemic levels of surgery.

The NHS in London faces a gap of up to £200 million between the amount trusts and CCGs say they need to deal with the next few months, senior sources in the capital’s health service say. The NHS in Greater Manchester also faces what officials call ‘a significant gap’.

The disclosure calls into question Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s pledge at the start of the pandemic to give the NHS ‘whatever resources it needs’ to cope with the pandemic. Trust bosses say problems have arisen because NHS England has stopped reimbursing all their costs as it did between April and September, and has instead adopted a new system of fixed allocations known as ‘financial envelopes’.

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “For hospitals to be struggling as they head into winter and a second wave of Covid is a dismal reminder that the NHS has now suffered from 10 years of acute underfunding, understaffing and bed cuts. Ministers promised the NHS would get whatever it needs. They now need to deliver on their promise to avoid a winter of misery for patients.”

Sally Gainsbury, a senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, said: “In March the chancellor categorically promised that the NHS would get ‘whatever resources it needs’ to support it through the pandemic. But it is looking increasingly clear that local health systems and NHS organisations have been short-changed with funding to cover the rest of this financial year.

“At the moment, many areas are effectively operating blind because of the continuing uncertainty over what their budget for this period, which started in October, will actually be. This is a worrying situation. Already, in some areas, the lack of certainty over how much money is left has made the already unenviable task of preparing for the second wave of Covid-19 cases more difficult. Our highly skilled clinicians and managers are throwing everything they have into coping with the second wave of this pandemic, but the last thing they need is to be distracted by budgetary constraints or the threat of financial penalties.”