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For once, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has not been at the centre of the campaign debates as the country prepares for its general election on June 8th. Voters at present have other major concerns, the most pressing of which are terrorism and the UK’s plans to leave the EU in 2019. Yet the problems facing the nation’s healthcare system are just as acute as they were during the 2015 election campaign, if not more so. These include:
- Growing demand for care from an ageing and growing population;
- Funding strains, with the UK spending less on health than many of its west European neighbours;
- Dissatisfaction among health workers, after several years of low pay rises and nearly two decades of often unpopular reforms;
- A continued debate about the role of private companies within the NHS;
- The knock-on effects of a squeeze on local budgets for social care;
- The potential impact of Brexit, particularly on recruitment and funding.
Voters are aware of all these problems. So it is not surprising that healthcare policies are at the centre of the various promises that UK political parties are making to voters, as they compete for seats. In the table on page 11, we have sorted the manifesto promises into categories, in order to compare them better.
As our comparison shows, the debate over the NHS’s weaknesses has now been running for so long that there is a remarkable consensus over these promises. All of the UK’s four main parties (Conservatives, Labour, Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats) have reaffirmed the basic principles of the NHS, including free access at the point of care for UK citizens. They have all pledged to improve standards, including keeping to accident and emergency (A&E) and waiting list targets. They all combine their health policies with policies on social care, the one area that has attracted attention during this campaign.
As for their policy priorities, they have all pinpointed general practitioners (GPs) and primary healthcare, mental health and public health. They also all agree that more money is needed to spend in the first place, and have pledged billions in extra funding. In this paper, The Economist Intelligence looks at what those promises might mean in practice for the NHS, whether they will come close to matching rising demand, and whether they appear to be affordable. Finally we look again at Brexit and assess what the parties’ positions here might mean for the country’s health service.
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