Jeremy Hunt warns NHS spending ‘will unravel’ without workforce plan

Health spending has grown 40 per cent since 2010 but the Chancellor has not revealed plans for workforce spending

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt is lobbying for a workforce plan for the NHS (PA)

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned extra funding for the NHS “will unravel quickly” without the extra doctors and nurses needed.

The health committee chair said today that the lack of any mention of workforce training budgets in the Chancellor’s speech on Wednesday was “the big gap” in news for the NHS.

Before the budget, Mr Hunt, who served as health secretary for six years and who has accepted he did not do enough to increase staffing levels in the NHS, said a workforce plan for the NHS was needed.

In the budget documents, released after the Chancellor Rishi Sunak had finished speaking, the Treasury confirmed only that it would continue to fund workforce training and repeated existing promises around 50,000 extra nurses.

But many experts including the Health Foundation and think tanks as well as NHS leaders have said what is needed is a properly costed long term workforce plan so that the NHS can train enough staff to meet future patient demand.

In an email message for his patient safety charity, Mr Hunt welcomed the increased spending on the NHS adding: “But the big gap was on workforce with no mention of what is happening to the Health Education England budget. The extra money for the NHS will unravel quickly if we do not train the extra doctors and nurses needed.

“Despite warm words about ‘funding to continue building a bigger and better trained NHS workforce’…the government has failed to confirm education and training budgets yet.

“The Health Foundation argues that ‘new money for technology and buildings, although vital, is of limited value without additional staff’. I couldn’t agree more.”

Spending on NHS England will grow by 3.8 per cent a year in real terms to 2025, the largest consistent increase in NHS spending for a decade.

NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, said not announcing budgets for workforce training was a missed opportunity by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

The government has ploughed billions into the NHS in order to reduce record waiting lists but critics from across the health sector have warned that without extra staff the NHS will struggle to do more activity.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in its comprehensive Budget analysis on Thursday that Mr Sunak has taken the state to the levels "not seen in normal times since the days of Geoffrey Howe", Margaret Thatcher's first chancellor.

Paul Johnson, the IFS's director, stressed that Mr Sunak was doing this with "almost entirely a set of policy choices unrelated to the pandemic" by responding to Government departments having been "starved of funding for a decade" under austerity.

He said health spending had increased by more than 40 per cent since 2010.