The general election campaign kicked off with a poster where David Cameron promised to ‘cut the deficit, not the NHS’. This directly followed his earlier pledge to protect NHS budgets against cuts, which would be inevitable in other Government departments. Now that Mr Cameron is at No. 10, the Coalition Government has stuck by this promise but is now under attack for doing so. If the deficit is even more of a black hole than the Conservatives imagined in Opposition then how can it be justified to protect health?
Those ‘airbrushed’ posters may not have been the roaring success that CCHQ hoped for but the message was very politically astute. The Conservative party wanted to position itself as the ‘party of the NHS’ and protecting budgets was a way to show that he was serious about this. This was a political move but one which, now enshrined in the Coalition Government’s programme, could be seen as misguided policy. The international development budget has also been protected but this has not attracted as much criticism as it is relatively small compared to the behemoth of the Department of Health’s budgets.
A recent report from the Adam Smith Institute has criticised any budget ringfencing whatsoever and the British Chambers of Commerce also made a similar statement this week. Those affected by tough cuts in other vital departments, education or local communities for example, may be up in arms at the protection given to those operating in the healthcare field. The NHS is not, after all, an entirely publicly owned space and one which has been known to be riddled with inefficiencies. Is it politicking or good policy?
Health budgets may be protected from cuts but this is little comfort to those used to the health services already available; last year Sir David Nicholson, the NHS Chief Executive, said that health services would need to find £20 billion of savings over the next five years to maintain the level of service currently provided. NHS spend rocketed during the Labour administration and Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health, has pledged to cut costs by cutting bureaucracy but this is a double edged sword as voluntary redundancies often cause a brain drain.
Next week’s Budget announcements will be a defining moment for this Government and not least due to the decisions made before they even glimpsed 10 Downing Street.
