Conservatives and Labour trade blows over health service

The Conservatives and Labour traded blows over their visions for, and funding of, the health service on Saturday after David Cameron pledged to provide an additional £8bn for the NHS by 2020.

Announcing the pledge at a hospital in his Oxfordshire constituency, the prime minister said he wanted "an NHS that continues to expand and improve and provide great care, that continues to save lives. It has always been there for me and my family and I want it there for everyone's families."

A plan, set out last year by Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, suggested a further £8bn a year by 2020 would be sufficient to maintain services at current levels, provided it was accompanied by £22bn of efficiency savings.

Mr Cameron said the Conservatives had taken the decision "to fund this plan in full, and we are able to do that because we have a strong economy and because we have taken the long-term decisions necessary to put the NHS first".

However, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, criticised the promise as "unfunded", adding: "The truth is you can't save the NHS if you don't know where the money is coming from."

Independent experts also questioned whether it would solve the NHS funding crisis.

Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation think-tank, welcomed the "certainty" provided by Mr Cameron's pledge. However, she pointed out, the £8bn figure assumed that the health service could improve its productivity by between 2 per cent and 3 per cent each year by 2020-21.

An analysis of official data by the think-tank for the Financial Times revealed that NHS hospitals had in fact improved efficiency at an average rate of only 0.4 per cent a year over this parliament. The NHS urgently needed "a transformation fund to help test and invest in new and more efficient models of care", added Dr Dixon.

The Nuffield Trust said, while the funding pledge represented a vote of confidence in Mr Stevens' plan, "prioritising the NHS in this way means taking difficult decisions about spending on other public services, including social care, which has seen deep cuts since 2010".

Nigel Edwards, chief executive, added that an additional £8bn would only allow the NHS "to run to stand still" as it kept health funding flat for each person in the population, taking into account their age and healthcare needs.

Another Conservative promise, to give all over-75s same-day access to a GP was criticised by the British Medical Association, which said it was unclear how the pledge would be funded and delivered.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, who chairs the BMA's GP committee, argued that putting in place "a simplistic age limit" for services ran the risk of distorting clinical priorities.

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Labour also pledged to abolish the health and social care act, which formalised the role of competition law in the NHS, and to guarantee a maximum one week wait for cancer tests as well as creating a new Cancer Treatments Fund to improve access to drugs, radiotherapy and surgery.

Mr Miliband also evoked the BBC TV programme Call the Midwife, set in the 1950s, as he promised to recruit 3,000 more midwives as part of a guarantee that all women would have one-to-one care during labour.

However, Jeremy Hunt, health secretary, said Labour would put the future of the NHS "at risk" because it would not match the Conservatives' funding commitments or their long-term economic plan.

"Ed Miliband has no plan to grow our economy - that's why he will put the future of our NHS at risk, just as Labour have done in Wales," added Mr Hunt.

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