Nick Robinson
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2015
last heard Jan 2015
Nick Robinson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My number is £8 billion.
That's the amount we were told had to be spent extra on the NHS by the Chief Executive of the Health Service.
That was the target for the end of the next Parliament, in other words, in five years' time.
We'll get to £8 billion by the end of the five years.
In other words, at the end of the next Parliament, by the time there's another general election coming, not the one we're about to have...
that the NHS will be spending each and every year £8 billion more than it currently is.
Well, it's the curiosity of numbers in politics, isn't it, that people love billions because it sounds like an awful lot of money and they hate percentages, partly because people struggle with percentages and partly because it makes it sound like a lot less.
Actually, it's a piffling sum, £8 billion.
It is nothing at all.
It is a fiver on the floor as far as the budget of the NHS is concerned.
The NHS budget in England, and it's done separately in England, is well over £100 billion.
So £8 billion by that time involves a real-terms increase of 1.5% each year for five years.
And you may say, well, in these austere times, 1.5% in real terms, my goodness, that is luxury.
But the figure that I like to compare it with always is Margaret Thatcher's cuts.
And the word cuts is very firmly in inverted commas because I'm always being told that Margaret Thatcher cut the NHS.
In fact, she and her government...
on average over the period, increased health spending by 3% in real terms, year on year on year.
So this ambitious new target that all of them are struggling, on all the political parties, to say that they will deliver, the new chief executive says is crucial, is half the rate of increase that Margaret Thatcher's government produced.
Well, he was trying to show that he was making a down payment on this.
but gave the impression to people, I think, that given he was spending two billion next year extra, he'd just keep adding two billion and that would add up to your eight.
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