The Tories simply cannot protect the NHS, let alone spend more on it

Today former NHS Chief Executive David Nicholson made an important intervention, arguing that the NHS is in growing financial crisis and can’t wait until 2020 for extra funding.

Labour agrees. The NHS needs extra funding, and political parties need to show where the money to make that happen will come from.

To date, despite flinging around desperate promises of ‘jam tomorrow’, the Tories haven’t found a single extra penny for the NHS in the next Parliament.

Quite the opposite. Conservative plans for extreme spending cuts in the next Parliament – doubling the cuts next year – mean they simply cannot protect the NHS, let alone spend more on it. Don’t take our word for this: other countries that have attempted spending cuts on the scale the Tories are proposing in the next Parliament have ended up cutting their health services drastically. Tory plans also threaten devastation for already-collapsing elderly care services – and as we have seen so vividly in the last few years, this hits the NHS too. Cameron’s care cuts are a root cause of the A&E crisis.

Labour, by contrast, has already identified how we will raise extra resources for the NHS. Our Time to Care Fund will raise £2.5bn a year to fund 20,000 more nurses and 8,000 more GPs – in the process breaking the hold that private staffing agencies currently have over the NHS – and to drive the service transformation needed to tackle future health challenges.

How will we raise this? Through choices based on Labour values: a Mansion Tax on properties over £2 million, through clamping down on tax avoidance by hedge funds, and through a new levy on tobacco companies, who make soaring profits on the back of ill health.

And here’s the key. Because the Tories won’t match these revenue-raising measures, our £2.5bn extra investment is over and above any funded plans the Conservatives set out.

Of course, the NHS needs much more than extra investment. As I set out in my speech to the Kings Fund in January 2013, if we do not integrate and reshape health and care services to better focus on prevention and support the increasing numbers of people with complex needs, the NHS will be overwhelmed by increasing costs. This argument has since been endorsed by John Oldham’s widely-respected Independent Commission on Whole-Person Care, published in March 2014, and by Simon Stevens’ Five Year Forward View, published in October 2014. This is why Labour has set out bold plans to integrate services and to use year-of-care budgets to increase the focus on prevention and early intervention, getting better value out of the money we spend on services.

The bottom line is that Labour will always give the NHS the funding it needs. The last Labour Government rescued the NHS after years of Tory neglect – doubling spending in real terms, and matching this with reform.

Today, we are the only party with a fully-funded plan to get extra investment into our NHS and, as Ed Balls said today, we’ll start straight away in our first Budget.

David Cameron, by contrast, seems to be to saying “You’ll just have to trust the Conservatives on the NHS”. As a political strategy, that strikes me as unlikely to work. This is the man who before the last election promised ‘no more top-down reorganisations’, and then gave us the biggest ever; who promised a ‘bare-knuckle fight’ to stop A&E closures, and then closed the very same A&Es; and who promised seven-day GP access, and then cut the scheme for evening and weekend opening, meaning hundreds fewer GP practices offered it.

The simple fact is that you can’t fund the NHS on an IOU, and you can’t trust the Tories on the NHS.

Andy Burnham is the Shadow Secretary of State for Health