British taxpayers were informed today that Boris Johnson’s manifesto busting £30 billion NHS handout will be eaten up permanently by the health service, with waiting lists and delays here to stay.
The Prime Minister promised the additional £10 billion a year to clear the enormous backlog that has accumulated during the pandemic, on top of the £5.4 billion cash boost announced for the NHS only a couple of days ago.
But the handout has been given to the NHS without any specific targets to meet, which has raised concerns the money will just be swallowed. NHS bosses have already complained the amount isn’t enough to clear the backlog.
Under the proposals, half of the £10 billion a year will be used on social care in 2023 before the entire amount is given to the care sector in 2025, and in theory, the NHS returns to its normal budget.
Critics have raised misgivings about the plan, claiming that if the NHS goes on a recruitment binge to fill staffing gaps then those salaries will need to be paid beyond 2025.
Announcing the tax hike yesterday, Boris Johnson said the money would go towards nine million more checks, scans and procedures by the end of 2025, as part of the biggest catch-up programme in the NHS’s history.
He vowed to increase NHS capacity for routine operations by 30 per cent compared to pre-pandemic levels, hire 50,000 more nurses and open new surgical hubs to deliver additional operations and other procedures.
According to the Resolution Foundation, by 2025, about 40 per cent of all day to day Government spending will go to the Department of Health and Social Care, which funds the health service.
The Conservative think tank, the Institute for Economic Affairs, warned the cash boost would almost entirely be used on hiring new staff and increasing salaries, which will be difficult to recover after 2025.
The left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said the funding was nothing like enough to get through the backlog, with the NHS alone needing £15 billion per year to address the waiting list.
NHS England was already 38,952 nurses short at the end of June and it’s not clear how fast surgical hubs could take to set up how they will be staffed.
A record 5.5 million people were on the waiting list for routine procedures and treatments, such as hip and knee replacements, at the end of June and with data for July due out tomorrow, that figure was expected to further rise.
A condition of this additional funding should be a wage freeze for all management grades in the NHS for the next five years, or until the COVID backlog is cleared, which should give them some incentive to up their game.
We are now at the back of a lengthy line, especially the British elderly, with many being denied the opportunity to even get in the queue, and it seems you’re now too old to get sight-saving cataract surgeries, pain-relieving treatment, and other life-saving treatments as well.
And I doubt a penny of it will even reach the necessary departments. It might pay for managers, senior managers, or even more senior managers and the refurbishment of their offices, and I bet they pay top rates for everything that’s brought in and don’t forget all those millions of illegals that are here getting special treatment while the British people get held back.
GP practices in England get an average of £155 per patient.
£3,783.6 million in global sum payments;
£715.8 million for the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF);
£833.5 million in premises payments;
And £1,515.5 million for the ‘balance of PMS expenditure’.
And then you have council tax, which gets hiked up every year and that depends on if the bin men choose to collect your rubbish or not.
Get rid of foreign aid, and sort out illegal immigration, which would help to save billions.
