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On the new NHS buildings money announcement, worth keeping a few points in mind:
Firstly, the NHS is already in an ongoing deficit situation with its present running costs. The underlying deficit, post-accounting tricks, is about £4bn/yr bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…
Secondly, the NHS currently has about 100,000 vacancies (40,000 of which are in nursing) digital.nhs.uk/data-and-infor…
Thirdly, the current maintenance backlog in the NHS wold cost around £6 billion to clear, £3 billion of which is safety-critical (i.e. urgent) health.org.uk/chart/how-much…
This huge maintenance backlog arose because of money for this work (capital) being transferred at large scale into the NHS's running costs (revenue)
(Oh, and if you want to hear something good about PFI hospitals, they're not allowed by contractual law to neglect their maintenance in this way.)
Fourthly, it's quite reasonable to be sceptical and detail0-hungry on this announcement given the hsj.co.uk/finance-and-ef… recent form of the May government
... which has continued under the Johnson government statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence…
Fifthly, could the national media please have a go at asking exactly how this is going to be funded?
As our tax system stands now, if the Government wants an extra £4 billion to spend, they need to put 1p on the basic rate of income tax (fairest & most progressive way).
So to come near to sorting the problems, it's 1p on tax for the missing NHS running costs, 1.5p on tax for the NHS maintenance backlog and 3p on tax for the new buildings.
Then it's x p on tax (where x is a number I don't know) to pay for the salaries of the 100,000 staff the NHS is currently missing.
Obviously, the maintenance backlog and new building costs are non-recurring, so those tax rises are not forever. But the others are.
Let's see if anyone points any of this out.
