David Cameron has been accused of hypocrisy over the NHS after official figures revealed that the Treasury has taken back £1.4bn of money earmarked for health spending which was not spent by the Department of Health.
Labour condemned the move as a "raid" on NHS funding by George Osborne, while unions representing doctors and nurses and the country's leading health thinktank said patients would lose out as a result.
The Treasury have confirmed that £1.4bn of £1.7bn not spent by the department on the NHS in England in 2011-12 had come back to it. Whitehall sources said it would now be used to help fund the freeze in council tax, major infrastructure projects and other key areas of public spending not related to health.
Most of the £1.7bn underspend was the result of the NHS employing fewer managers and ministers scaling back on "wasteful" IT projects and administration costs, a DH spokesman said. "The reason why there's an underspend is because of efficiency [savings]," he added.
"The government promised that all efficiency savings would be reinvested in the NHS, but Friday's figures confirm George Osborne's £1bn raid on its budget to pay for tax cuts for millionaires," said Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary. "People will today see David Cameron for the NHS conman he is: repeatedly cutting the budget on the quiet while 4,000 nursing posts are axed and patients pay the price."
Prof John Appleby, chief economist at the King's Fund health thinktank, said the DH should not have allowed the underspend to be taken. "This money shouldn't have been given back by Andrew Lansley. It could have been spent on health or social care, where we know we need to spend more money because needs are rising," he said. "This is over a billion pounds that was agreed by parliament to be spent on healthcare, which now won't be, so it's very surprising that ministers have agreed to do this given we know that there are extra demands on the NHS, and this money could have been used to improve people's health."
The British Medical Association, the doctors' union, said that any savings made in the NHS should go into improving patient care, not to the Treasury. "It is unclear how these efficiency savings were made and we need to see more detail. If it is the case that significant efficiency savings have been achieved, these resources should be reinvested in patient care," said a BMA spokeswoman.
Dr Peter Carter, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said the generation of a £1.7bn surplus at the same time as many hospital trusts were cutting staff to save money was "a matter of great concern. Any Treasury clawback will only serve to take resources still further from the frontline. Money saved would be far better invested in providing patient care and keeping people fit and healthy. Patients will rightly question why money is diverted elsewhere at a time when demand is rising and resources are scarce."
But Whitehall sources countered that the £1.4bn clawback was less than the amount of DH underspend they have taken back in recent years, which has averaged £2bn and reached £2.9bn in 2007-08.
Labour also seized on a separate DH admission that actual spending by the NHS in England last year was slightly less than the year before, bucking a longstanding year-on-year upward trend. According to Treasury figures the, service spent £104.24bn in 2011-12, which was £26m – or 0.02% – less than 2010-11. The fall occurred despite the coalition's pledge to increase the NHS budget by 0.1% a year every year until 2015. The Guardian
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