Phil Kemp
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Phil Kemp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yep, they could have.
Yeah, the other thing that doesn't get mentioned is that demand for NHS services is increasing and so are the costs of providing healthcare.
So a real-terms increase in NHS funding could still mean less healthcare, fewer drugs, fewer nurses per patient and so on, relative to demand.
Gemma Tetlow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies made exactly that point to me earlier.
OK, here's Diane Abbott.
She's Labour's shadow public health minister.
Now, Labour put some numbers to this problem.
They said that a primary care trust like Manchester, for example, would lose £41 million and that Surrey would gain by £61 million.
Let me try to explain what I think is going on here.
This is all about a chunk of money that central government gives to primary care trusts in England, which is earmarked for tackling health inequalities between regions.
So if you're a region with poor health, you get extra help.
And the government is reducing the percentage of the NHS budget devoted to that problem from 15% to 10%.
At the same time, though, from this year onwards, the government says it will, as it promised, increase health spending in every English region in real terms.
Yeah, but if you're worried about inequalities between regions, then you might still be concerned about this.
But here's a point which I think got lost in all of this.
Let's look at one of the examples that Labour gave.
They said Manchester Primary Care Trust will lose £41 million from its health inequalities pot, and that's about 4% of its entire budget.
You might be forgiven for thinking that they meant Manchester Primary Care Trust would lose £41 million now or next year, perhaps.
In fact, £41 million is the amount they'll lose in today's money from their budget every year at the end of a process building up to that amount.
And the report these numbers come from suggests that that process could take 20 years.
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