The Conservatives Spent More on the NHS

I keep hearing about how the Tories slashed the NHS. The data says otherwise.

Let’s start with the chart because I want that to be the main image for this article!

I saw another facebook post today about how the evil Tories have been bad to the NHS

I have been meaning to put together a proper chart to tackle this idea since having a conversation with another smart friend of mine:

Everybody believes that the Tories have in some way trashed the NHS. So it must be true right?

Before we dig in to this, let’s acknowledge that there is a LOT to talk about with the NHS. You might think that the Tories manage it badly, or that PFS is wasteful, or that nurses are underpaid, or that we exploit overseas workers, or that Jeremy Hunt was did a terrible job around the doctor’s strike. You may have a host of complaints about how the NHS has been managed under the Tories, I would probably agree with you on a bunch of them.

This article only tackles the question of overall NHS spending.

If you believe that the Tories have cut spending, and that Labour spent more on the NHS, (and if you care about data) then this article is for you.

Let’s go back to the data.

• For 12 out of 13 years in the last Labour government, Labour spent less than 7% of GDP on the NHS.
• Every Single Year of the Coalition/Conservative government has spent more than 7% of GDP on the NHS
• Every Single Year of the Coalition/Conservative government have spent more in real terms than Every Single Year of the previous Labour government.

So how come the Tories are the bad guys?

It’s true that Labour dramatically increased NHS spending. They took it from about 4.6% of GDP to about 7.5% of GDP. You can call that a 63% increase in spending.

A lot of this increase came in the Brown years. I have marked the peak spending under Blair in the chart (see ‘Blair Peak’). Tory/Coalition is way higher than it ever was under Blair.

You can argue that spending needs to go higher. The population is getting older, new treatments are being invented, there is always more that the NHS could do.

Logically though, at some point, you have to say ‘this is enough, we can’t endlessly increase NHS spending’.

It’s a tough call where that should be. Should we spend 10% of GDP on healthcare? 20%? 30%?

We certainly could spend 30% on healthcare and still have things we wanted to do that needed more money, but logically at some point a government has to decide that taxes can only go so high, and other priorities have to take precedence.

The coalition government essentially decided to say ‘Let’s stop here’ when they took the reins from Gordon Brown.

They took the peak spending in the last year of Gordon Brown’s regime and drew a line in the sand at slightly under that level.

Let’s look at that chart again

The Tories have not increased NHS spending nearly as much as the Labour government did — but they have definitely increased it in real terms by a meaningful amount.

The Tories have shrunk NHS spending as a percentage of GDP slightly, but they have still kept spending in every year above every year of Labour spending except for the final year of the Gordon Brown regime.

You can always argue that more should be spent on the NHS

• And Schools
• And Roads
• And Welfare payments
• And a host of other fantastic causes

This is hard. There is a limited amount of money that the government can spend. They can increase taxes , but that only goes so far.

(and taxes are higher now than they ever were in the Blair/Brown years*)

Resource allocation is complicated and hard. It’s a lot more complicated than ‘Tories bad, Labour good’.

But having looked at these charts can you really disagree with the statement that the NHS has had more money under the Tories than it did under Labour.

We should absolutely debate how the NHS is resourced and managed. We will have a better debate if we start from the data.

Please share this article wherever you see that ‘someone is wrong on the internet’!

Chart and data are here
Data comes from the House of Commons library (linked in the chart)

*One for Another article perhaps…