Boris Johnson caught out again? ‘£1bn a week for NHS’ Brexit claim FACT-CHECKED

National Insurance rise will ‘support’ NHS says Coffey

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Published in the paper entitled ‘Benefits of Brexit: How the UK is taking advantage of leaving the EU’, the Government said it was already “spending more money on our NHS”. It went on: “By the 2024–2025 financial year our yearly expenditure on our NHS is projected to be £57billion higher in cash terms than we spent in 2016–17, or over £1billion more per week.” But with the Brexit bus fiasco still fresh in the minds of voters, the fresh claims have been met with scepticism. 

Vote Leave’s claim that £350million could go to the NHS instead of the EU each week was hotly disputed during the EU referendum and resulted in an attempt to prosecute Boris Johnson over attempting to mislead the public with the claims. 

Mr Johnson stood by the claim, however, saying last summer it might, in fact, have been an “underestimation” — a claim firmed up by this week’s publication of the Brexit Benefits paper.

But how accurate is this claim, and, if £1billion is really going straight to the NHS rather than the EU, why are British taxes going up to fund improvements to the health service and social care?

Dr Steve McCabe, Economist at Birmingham City University, told Express.co.uk that within the £ billion claim, “there is a degree of spin going on”. 

In order to understand the full picture, Dr McCabe said “it’s important to look at the figures for funding for the NHS in recent years”.

The Kings Fund, a UK health systems think tank, has analysed core NHS funding from the 2008/9 period until 2021/22, which gives a sense of how inflation impacts funding. 

As the chart below shows, core NHS funding in the 2016/17 period, for example, was  £137.4billion. 

However, Dr Mc Cabe said: “Because of inflation, a pound five years ago has a lot less spending power now.

“Cumulative inflation since 2016/17 has been 21.8 percent.”

So, taking this figure into account, £137.4 billion would now be well over £167 billion.

However, the data shows that this year, funding is on £159 billion (not including additional Covid funding) — meaning that, in real terms, there’s actually been a cut of more than £18 billion.

Dr McCabe said: “It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that the promise of £57 billion by 2024–2025 will not be in real terms.”

He added: “In effect, at best, the NHS will have to make do with what it’s being given now…as we know, the NHS was already struggling before the pandemic and, unless there’s phenomenal extra funding, will continue to be regarded as failing.”

So where might such “phenomenal extra funding” come from? 

This week, the Government announced a potential cap on legal costs for NHS negligence claims which it said could “save the NHS £500million”.

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The Department of Health said claimants’ legal costs for “lower value claims” were “currently more than four times higher on average” than the NHS’s legal costs in defending the claims and promised to tackle “increasing and disproportionate legal fees”.

Dr McCabe, however, said he feared privatisation might be desired by the Johnson administration. 

He said: “The notion of the NHS failing is convenient to many within the current administration who believe that the only way to achieve ‘success’ is to bring additional funding from the private sector.”

However, he said, the £10billion written off by the Government on lost, unusable or overpriced PPE proved privatisation was “far from a magic bullet”. 

There is also the imminent increase in National Insurance to plug the gap in health and social care, which will, from 2023, form an entirely separate tax called the Health and Social Care Levy. 

The tax hike — which reneges on a key Tory manifesto promise — will deliver an extra £12 billion per month. 

In a joint article written for the Sunday Times, Mr Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak wrote that “every penny” extra taken from British households will go towards “crucial objectives”, including “nine million more checks, scans and operations, and 50,000 more nurses, as well as boosting social care”. 

Express.co.uk has reached out to the Cabinet Office for comment.

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