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Boris Johnson is to announce a £1.8bn immediate cash injection for the National Health Service to help clear a massive maintenance backlog and upgrade hospitals.
The injection, first reported by the Financial Times on Friday, will start to be pumped into the service straight away, and is in addition to a five-year funding settlement announced by Theresa May, the former prime minister, last year under which annual spending will have risen by an additional £20.6bn a year by 2023-4.
About £850m of the new sum will be earmarked for building projects at 20 hospitals, with details to be announced on Monday.
Mr Johnson has made clear that the NHS will be a principal focus of his administration, convinced that the Conservatives can win over voters in a policy area where the opposition Labour party has traditionally held an advantage.
Central to his successful leadership of the Leave campaign during the European Union referendum in 2016 was a claim that the UK would gain £350m a week from quitting the EU, which could be used to boost NHS funding.
However, responding to the new funding announcement, experts and opposition politicians argued the sum fell far short of what was needed to make up for years of cuts to capital budgets.
NHS Providers, which represents hospitals in England, recently identified a £6bn shortfall in the funding needed for repairs, with £3bn of that sum required to rectify issues judged to be “safety critical”.
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said the new funding was “a welcome down payment” on the “staggering” sum needed to clear the backlog of NHS maintenance. But he said it was “only a fraction” of what a programme of hospital upgrades would really cost.
“Nobody should expect shiny new hospitals in their towns any time soon,” he said.
Unless the current workforce crisis was comprehensively tackled, “any new beds will be languishing on ghost wards,” he added.
The Health Foundation, a charity, reported earlier this year that since 2010/11, capital spending by the department for health and social care (DHSC) had declined in real terms — from £5.8bn in 2010/11 to £5.3bn in 2017/18, a fall of 7 per cent. Most of the fall was explained by transfers by the department from the capital to the revenue budget, to focus more funding on day-to-day running costs.
It concluded that the fall in the DHSC’s capital budget had contributed to the UK having a low level of capital investment in healthcare by international standards, with the UK now spending about half the share of GDP on capital in healthcare compared with similar countries.
Ben Gershlick, senior economist at the Health Foundation, said: “While the prime minister might be looking forward to cutting the ribbon at a new hospital ward, years of under-investment in the NHS’s infrastructure means this extra money risks being little more than a drop in the ocean.” Just bringing England up to the OECD average for capital spending on healthcare would require an extra £4bn a year by 2023/24, he added.
For Labour, Jonathan Ashworth, shadow health secretary, said the new funding “even if it’s ever delivered, falls significantly short of what’s needed to provide quality, safe care to patients after years of Tory cuts”.
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