Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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really up the ante with efficiencies but that would presume really significant efficiencies and productivity gains and health experts say you know what we'll be really lucky I mean looking at past performance and other industries it's unreasonable to expect the NHS to achieve productivity or two or three percent which was kind of the upper bounds in that report but Eddie a final thought if I may um
In 2009-10, the Department of Health was nearly a quarter of all departmental spending for the government.
This financial year, it'll be about a third.
And this shows, I think, how much the NHS has been protected and correspondingly the scale of the cuts on other departments.
And this trend is likely to continue.
So the difference between the parties as regards the other departments is probably more significant.
On the NHS, there may not be that much between them in practice.
Since this interview was broadcast, more manifestos have been published.
The Greens say they want to reverse public spending cuts, while the SNP wants to increase departmental spending and certain benefits.
I asked the Conservative Party and they said what they mean is they've estimated the average annual season ticket price for this year and then projected how much the cost would go up each year under Labour's policy compared to their freeze.
So they're adding up savings over several years and making assumptions about what Labour would do when Labour tell me they haven't said yet.
So it's another severe case, I'm afraid, Eddie, of politician maths.
But still, let's look at what they mean by freeze.
It's a freeze the coalition government has had in place for two years already, actually.
And the policy is that regulated fares would rise in line with inflation and no more.
Now, if they were using the CPI, Consumer Prices Index, as their measure of inflation, that would be good news for rail passengers.
It's currently 0%, but they're not.
They're using the RPI, the Retail Prices Index, that measure of inflation, which is currently 1%, and in fact always tends to be higher.
It is, isn't it?
Yeah.
Showing 361–380 of 4,250 · page 19 of 213
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