The Liberal Democrats have released a set of demands for tomorrow’s Autumn Statement, including an urgeng £4bn injection of funding into the NHS, to avert a winter crisis and prevent declining performance and longer waiting lists next year.
The £4bn demand breaks down as follows:
- £1.3bn additional funding for social care
- £1.8bn additional transformation funding, to deliver modernisation and improve efficiency in the NHS
- £400m additional dedicated funding for mental health
- £500m additional emergency funding to plug gaps across services
You can find more detail on the party’s website here, alongside demands for a commitment to the Single Market, housebuilding, a public sector pay rise and support for small business.
It will be instructive to see whether the chancellor can continue to put off the so-called “punishment budget” – the Leave campaign’s name for George Osborne’s observation that he would have less money to spend in a damaged post-Brexit economy. Much will hinge on the state of economic forecasts, which themselves are clouded by political uncertainty.
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9 Comments
I am very surprised to read that among the Party’s key demands are ‘granting full relief from inheritance tax when transferring assets from the family business to the next generation’. This is at odds with our commitment to distribute wealth, and I struggle to think why anyone in the Party would think now is a good time for us to argue for even more tax breaks for the asset rich, and especially one that will be particularly effective at further eroding social mobility. I would be interested to know who put this forward but, better still, for it to be quietly dropped! The focus on the NHS is great, but we should also be calling for more Keynesian infrastructure spending.
I think this is generally good. I’d have wanted to see something on benefits uprating and / or universal credit tapering. The headline one should be removing the borrowing cap on councils – although I would say that as a councillor quaking at the budget pressure on housing next year.
I agree with Paul Pettinger above though – why on earth are we calling for inheritance tax breaks for family firms? Too complicated, too few people impacted, and dubious whether it’s really something we should be supporting.
I like the way the Lib Dem party has set out the areas where the additional funds should be spent.
I would also suggest setting aside an extra £500m pa to be invested in productivity and efficiency improvements in the NHS and a further £500m pa to be invested in productivity and efficiency improvements in social care.
In particular there is scope for using information technology to improve productivity and efficiency but this needs capital investment that is often sacrificed for day to day expenditure.
I seem to remember that earlier this year the Lib Dems called for ring fenced amount of extra tax to solve the long term funding problem of the health service. .Is this still party policy? In relation to the £4bn extra spend how is this going to be funded?
I seem to remember that earlier this year the Lib Dems called for a ring fenced amount of extra tax to solve the long term funding problem of the health service. .Is this still party policy? In relation to the £4bn extra spend how is this going to be funded?
This is excellent , but we need our approach to be loud and clear and heard often, as the voice of the people using the service , the patients, because the interests of the professionals are important , but they have the bodies to speak for them, the public do not .
As someone who has , directly witnessed the extent of let down as well as support that the NHS provides, we must be friends who criticise when necessary . The levels of mismanagement and intransigence in the service are very definite and quite insufferable at times !
This passport for the NHS thing from the Tories is daft. My passport is out of date and there are many who don’t have one at all – no one in Britain should be refused medical treatment! The key is to stop so many coming in the first place.
Eddie
Your comments add really sensible compassion to my more acerbic ones. The very pathetic attempt by Chris Wormack , the Department of Health bureaucrat responsible for the outrageous passport checks for health care nonsense , proves my point , the NHS is an incompetent organisation top to bottom, at the level of the actual organisation of it .
We have always had a system, get a national insurance number, you can get an NHS number, get an NHS number , you get free treatment . It can be easily adapted to give all residents whose governments are meant to be billed, a code or note on their GP system, and on receipt of the details at a hospital , treatment is possible . Considering the wait for hospital treatment , such minor proofs available on computer systems add no delays . A moron could work out ways of proving once , getting a code , putting it on a system. But a government official at the top of a department of Health , nor other staff, cannot.
What is it with , in this xenophobic , populist , Trump era of extreme stupidity , that is making the late President Reagan, and his talk about getting government off the backs of people , seem like Liberalism today ?!
On Monday one of the TV News programmes I watched there was a piece on the Autumn Statement which reported that some people on Universal Credit would be over £900 worse off because of the Osborne changes. Therefore I am disappointed that we are not calling for something to done to reverse these welfare cuts. It would be easy to think that those who came up with this package haven’t got the message that something needs to be done for those who are having difficulty managing.