Tory cuts will put the NHS at risk, says Balls

Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor, has outlined today how the Tories’ planned £70 bn cuts to public services would affect public services.

In a speech at the RSA, Balls highlighted in particular that the cuts would put the NHS at serious risk. He also explained that if the £70 bn of spending cuts (excluding the £12bn Osborne has said the Tories would cut from social security spending) were applied equally to non-protected departments they would mean cuts to services like policing and social care. This could result in the smallest police force since records began and more than 1/3 of older people losing access to social care.

Balls drew on analysis –  published today – examines 7 countries from across the OECD where cuts, on a similar scale to the Tories proposed plan, were carried out. Using this data, Labour have forecast that cuts in the UK over the next Parliament could mean a real terms cut – amounting to over £10bn – in NHS by 2019-2020.

This morning Balls explained:

“This is the implication of the choice that George Osborne made last December – and which he is now trying to brush under the carpet.

“If he is to deliver on his Autumn Statement plans for a £23 billion overall budget surplus, as he says, through a Budget with no fiscal loosening, while promising unfunded tax cuts in the next parliament, then he is going to have to deliver these colossal cuts. 

“These would lead to the smallest police force since comparable records began, the smallest army since Cromwell, and over a third of older people receiving social care losing their entitlement to it. 

“An unprecedented £70 billion of spending cuts which would be deeply destructive and close to impossible, even for this Chancellor. So George Osborne must surely have an alternative plan in his back pocket.

 “The evidence is clear – countries which reduce public spending at the pace George Osborne intends have found they have had no alternative but to cut health spending.

“And those who have reduced public spending to the levels that George Osborne is seeking have health systems where charging for services is triple the share here.    

“This shouldn’t be a surprise. When George Osborne’s plan means such extreme cuts to day to day departmental budgets it’s common sense that the NHS, which makes up a full third of the £317 billion spent in those budgets, ends up footing the bill.

“Even though our NHS is currently under great financial pressure, the international evidence which we set out in our document today suggests that the NHS will end up paying the price if George Osborne pursues his extreme planned spending cuts.

“With the Conservatives planning cuts to day to day spending in the next Parliament more than double the level they claim – an unprecedented £70 billion of spending cuts which would be deeply destructive and close to impossible, even for this Chancellor – there is a real risk that the Chancellor will be forced to bear his promise to ring-fence the NHS.

“And after their broken pledge not to have a top-down re-organisation of the NHS in this Parliament, the British people know that the Tories have form when it comes to broken promises on the NHS.”