Osborne's £3.8 billion sleight of hand

So Chancellor Osborne is claiming to be rescuing the NHS by frontloading (significant increases beginning this year) the £8billion+ it promised over 5 years, rather than backloading as originally intended.

The Government is still claiming that this will pay for a 7 day NHS (which hardly anyone wants - e.g. 2/3 of patients just surveyed by the Royal College of GPs say the government should improve existing services before stretching them) and might even allow Hunt some margin to settle with the Junior Doctors. However a good chunk of the funding will be swallowed up by the deficits already run up this year throughout the NHS. Nearly everyone outside the government agrees that the £22 billion efficiency savings which Simon Stevens imagined as balancing the books cannot be achieved so the deficit will still keep on growing.

Except that there are some private sector suppliers rubbing their hands, not in healthcare but in IT. Articles from Computer Weekly and digitalhealth.net unearthed by Our NHS state that the Department of Health, advised of course by the notorious McKinsey consultants (whose 2010 Labour commissioned report provided part of the motor for the Health and Social Care Bill), has asked the Treasury for £3.5 billion for IT investment (including electronic records) in order to save up to £8billion. I think we've heard this one before and the problems associated with the implementation of STHFT's new Lorenzo system (palmed off by the government to desperate Trusts despite its being generally regarded as unfit) hardly help the credibility of IT led solutions. But rest assured - the Department is spending money on developing a digital maturity index to be applied to CCGs and health economies by the Care Quality Commission!

So there is going to have to be a lot of pressure to try and ensure that any additional funding does actually do some good. There is an additional problem in that the budget for the following 2 to 3 years is pretty flat. Real terms investment will drop to just £500m in the third year, before rising again to £1.7bn in 2020-21. And beware of percentages - different estimates of the total Department of Health budget are being used; also details of the overall budget under tomorrow's full spending review announcement are still not clear.

And where is the money coming from? Well, partly from the non ring-fenced parts of healthcare, including nurse training, public health and the Care Quality Commission, while the cuts in social care are being allowed only a smidgeon of necessary relief by allowing councils to raise an extra 2% in council tax - for which of course they will get the resentment. And then of course from all the other services (and service users, benefit recipients, tax credit claimants etc). Announcing the NHS budget separately from all the others shows that the Treasury still has not made the connections.

It's not exactly a recipe for national health - and incidentally the government yesterday closed a short and less than token consultation on its mandate to NHS England which was not publicised and barely noticed until Keep Our NHS Public people kicked up a stink because the website would not even accept responses to the consultation! In it they claimed that improving the nation's health was one of their overarching objectives. So why cut public health expenditure? And why put out an 8 page mandate which mentions staff only once?