To want fact not a rose-tinted view of the NHS under Labour?

[iseenodust]

Can we just be clear that privatisation of the NHS was started under Blair? Virgin started providing NHS services in 2006.

This does not detract from the much needed debate around priorities, staffing issues, resources, ageing demographics, postcode lottery etc. Can we please just have the discussion without the hypocrisy? Why Labour should stop crying privitisation.

where you do you the software to write that visual essay style thing?
I actually thought the writer was a real person wasted in medicine who should have been an artist till I saw the perfect freehand drawing of the UK.

Is the point of the OP that a lot of the good stuff we experienced under Labour was unsustainable/a stunt/setting us up for failure?

"I think a lot of the problems with the NHS are due to the way it was set up in the first place; pulling together lots of private doctors and hospitals with vested interests not wanting to give up their independence or level of private income. It has never been the logical cohesive public service of myth."

I agree. I think the public are more aware of this nowadays.

When I sit in my GP's waiting room watching the lecturing video about how GPs are retiring early I think "wow! to have such a great pension you can retire early! Why didn't I do chemistry instead of maths?"

Which is probably not what they intend me to think.....

Its happening again snowballs chance in hell of them being elected that Labour are planning on dumping massive amounts of money in the NHS. Sounds great but the magic money tree is going to be beaten to death to get it. The only place I can see them getting so much money is to borrow it.

Nurses grants reinstated, pay rises, more staff on duty etc and that's before we even put a penny into improving the NHS... and then there is social care.. and next years winter flu crises, new cancer drugs, care homes, pensions and ending the postcode lottery ... the NHS pit is bottomless.

Ten years down the line a Tory government would be elected to sort out a financial crises and get blamed when they have to cut back Labours massive spending at the same time as having to deal with and even bigger public debt.

When will people see borrowing more and more money is making the problem worse. We need the NHS to be sustainable, and giving it an unlimited overdraft will not do that.

perking

The difference between the two is that I am quoting central government expenditure for 16/17 and you are quoting total expenditure: ie. central and local.

I probably should have made it clear that I was quoting central and not local due to partial funding for local coming through local taxation and precepts (for crime commissioners, for example.)

My apologies if I've confused anyone, but my stats aren't wrong for central government. You'll find them on table 6.4 of the pesa doc.

And my point in mentioning health spend in terms of %GDP and %public expenditure was to say that you cannot really draw reasonable conclusions from comparisons between countries using these measures.

Thanks werkz. Its still a bit confusing to leave out the local expenditure: ie with the policing figures, and the waste management figures, including the local expenditure would increase these a lot, wouldn't it?
So it is a bit inadvertently misleading to say that we spend less on policing than we do on broadcasting. Local government expenditure is a big part of the services we directly relate to in our daily lives. I've been wondering whether part of the problem with people's perception of public spending is that they think of it as being spent on services they don't access (eg "scrounger's" benefits). Whereas we all need our bins collected, our streets maintained (is it local authorities that fill in the potholes on residential streets?), libraries, parks, etc.
I've been ranting about it on other threads, but the cuts to council budgets are really worrying me. I am not an economist though, so I may be getting the wrong end of the stick! I have found both your posts and perking's informative, thanks.

@Anon1234567890 Its happening again snowballs chance in hell of them being elected...

I thought that about Brexit.
And then I thought that about Trump.

Nothing is guaranteed any more. Especially when you have a party that is claiming some magic porridge pot of money to fund unicorns and diamond shoes for everyone. Why wouldn't your average woman on the street vote for that?!

Wrong again, werkzallhours.

Almost none of your stats match Table 6.4 for 2016/17 (or any other year I've noticed, though I haven't thoroughly checked).

Broadcasting & publishing is the only match I've found, at £4,177 million rounding to £4.2 billion.

Education is less than half of what you claimed.

Fire-protection + law courts + prisons drops from approx £12.6 billion in Table 5.2 (total public expenditure, 2015/16), to approx £9.3 billion in Table 6.4 (public expenditure on those functions within central govt, 2016/17). You claimed £26 billion.

Actually it was obvious that the explanation you gave, that your figures pertained to central expenditure rather than central + local expenditure, wasn't going to cut it, because many of your claims were more than the Table 5.2 (total expenditure) figures.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/538793/pesa_2016_web.pdf

Seriously, put the spade down!

Look, what's really raised my eyebrows isn't that you got your figures wrong (we all make mistakes), but that you've plunged cheerfully on drawing conclusions from them, despite the obvious red flags.

For anyone with any feel for the UK economy, the statement "We spend more public money on broadcasting than on the police," should trigger a reality check.

Sometimes eye-catching figures and conclusions do turn out to be correct, and are a revelation. Other times checking shows we've gone astray, either with the number or its meaning.

This is the art of learning from data, (rather than using it as a blind man uses lampposts - for support not illumination). Recognising "that's odd" not only helps us catch where we've wandered astray, it can open new fields of enquiry! There's a classic story about the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer: the software was programmed to ignore anomalous readings as meaningless errors. When the scientists went back to examine the raw data, it turned out the anomalous readings were of... an anomaly, and there was a damn great hole over Antarctica.

Anyway, if anyone is actually interested in police funding, here's a BBC article with a graph of both central government funding and council tax precept over several years. It's England & Wales only, up to 2014/15, real terms in 2014–15 prices, figures taken from an IFS report which on a quick glance seems very informative, explains the sources of police funding, and gives more figures and detail on what is and isn't included in them.

squishy, you may find that report interesting given your concern about local council budgets. I'm getting a bit tired, so I hope I've read it right, but in summary, central government still provided more than two-thirds of public funding to police in E&W in 2014/15, although the percentage of the police's public funding that comes from central government has dropped significantly between 1995-2015.

Thank you PerkingFaintly.

Werkz - thank you for your posts.

So refreshing - and essential - to have someone look at the figures, explain hings clearly rather than just a wave of insults,"opinions", and poorly understood "facts" - ie anecdote.

Not sure if this is the way forward re health/social care. CCG pools budget with local authority. If anyone knows more I'm not a subscriber...

And my point in mentioning health spend in terms of %GDP and %public expenditure was to say that you cannot really draw reasonable conclusions from comparisons between countries using these measures.

Not true - fortunately!

The WorldBank doesn't go to the trouble of collecting and publishing these figures for the good of its, er, health!

With context, health spend as %GDP can be very useful for comparison.

Eg a common trope at the moment is to wail "the UK can't afford a national health service."

So we might look at a country with a GDP in the same ballpark, say France, which in 2014 had a GDP of $2,839 billion and spent 11.5% of GDP on health care. A per capita spend of $4,508, PPP.

While the UK had a GDP of $2,999 billion and spent 9.1% of GDP on healthcare in 2014. A per capita spend of $3,377, PPP.

And ask, "Why is that?" and "How well is that working well for them?"

We can even do as discussed above, and use our knowledge of GDP over several years to decide if those figures are a blip; or reasonably constant; or whether say a decrease in %GDP spend means a decrease in actual spend... or reflects increased GDP in a booming economy.

(2014 figures from WorldBank UK summary, WorldBank France summary and WorldBank table 2.12.)

Yes, iseenodust, closer integration of medical care and social care is definitely on the cards. My first thought is "And a good thing, too!", although we'll have to see how it pans out in practice.

Here's a bit about integration in Scotland: news.gov.scot/news/health-and-social-care-integration-takes-step-forward

There we go, I knew I'd seen something on this.

NHS Health Check: Five examples of innovation in the UK
"In Glasgow, older patients have been helped to leave hospital thanks to a programme that opened 90 beds in private nursing homes. Discharge policies were changed so that patients could leave hospital within 72 hours, and their long-term needs could be assessed outside hospital, rather than lying in a hospital bed.
"The intermediate care programme, as it is called, was set up in 2014 by Glasgow City Council and NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde."

They think it's working very effectively, so far.

Thanks Perking we have had small scale programmes such as that example of innovation in my neck of the woods too (nursing home beds used for a subcontracted stroke rehab service).

I can't decide if I think the pooling of health and social care budgets at a local level is a good thing or will just make it a bigger political football? Jury is out.

@werkzallhourz, Sorry it has taken me so long to thank you for your lengthy reply to my question.

You argue Brown should have saved some of the surplus during the boom years and not gone into deficit. Yet the spending did put money into areas that needed it such as health, education and lifting children out of poverty after years of the Tories putting so little into these services. I remember the long NHS waiting times pre Blair govt. Yet I do take on board the PFI model of funding for infrastructure for NHS has caused high debt for NHS and was a bad choice. Also important to note Brown did keep the debt % to GDP still at very reasonable levels. I read yesterday since the 2WW UK governments ran apart from a handful of years a yearly deficit and it wasn't considered bad as long as it is kept to below 3% of GDP as growth and inflation would eat up the deficit at this level and below with the national debt continuing to shrink apart from exceptional circumstances such as the two worlds war and the two global crashes of 1929 and 2008. So the view point that Brown was irresponsible to have a modest deficit in the surplus years between 2001 to 2008 when the huge global financial crash happened is open to challenge. Yes, Brown didn't anticipate the global crash, but neither did the Tories at that time saying at the time they would follow the same spending plans as Labour running a modest deficit if they were in govt.

As was noted above Conservatives ran a deficit, often higher than Brown, for I I think 17 of the 18 years they were in power. I hear the argument some of those years they had to pay off the larger deficits in the 1970's but I don't understand why they had to for 17 out of the 18 years if they were supposedly a party who believed in running surpluses. Perhaps because as I read earlier reasonable annual deficits were not seen as fiscal irresponsibility. Finally, I read this viewpoint online "In 1997 the UK was paying £27.5bn annually just to service John Major’s debt, which would be equivalent to around £41bn in 2011-12. Thankfully, Brown did fix the roof when the sun was shining and John Major’s debt interest was not allowed to accrue. Had he not, then one may have had to query whether the UK could have withstood the global financial crisis that struck in 2008."

Finally, though Hammond has scrapped the Osborne/Cameron aim for the economy to be in surplus by 2020 by brutal austerity, probably with the looming huge cost of Brexit he knows it would be impossible, they are still going ahead with the huge cuts imposed by Osborne and public services and welfare are still going to face more deep cuts with more suffering to follow. Overall I don't think Conservatives have shown to be any better at managing the economy than Labour overall despite this myth that Conservatives are and due to this and as I believe their policies do not spread economic costs and benefits more fairly across the whole of society I will not vote for them this June.

@Anon1234567890, as I wrote above it's not true that Labour under Blair ran up much bigger annual deficits than Conservatives. For the first years of Blair's govt they actually ran a surplus, something that has happened only a handful of years since the 2WW. In the later years of the Blair govt, Brown kept the debt % to GDP still at very reasonable levels below 3% of GDP. I read growth and inflation would eat up the deficit at this level of debt to GDP and below and the national debt would continue to shrink apart from exceptional circumstances such as the two worlds war and the two global crashes of 1929 and 2008. The large increase in the national debt since 2008 is due to the global crash and the govt having to bail out the banks not because Brown spent wildly in the previous years. Yes, Brown didn't anticipate the global crash, but neither did the Tories saying at the time they would follow the same spending plans as Labour running a modest deficit if they were in govt.

Werkzallhourz, you wrote

"the deficit was not because the government gave the banks taxpayer's money to bail themselves out. It is not a question of the NHS having to suffer budget cuts because the government gave that money to the banks. That is a huge misunderstanding of the nature of the bank bailouts under the chancellorship of Alastair Darling. "

You explain it is because tax receipts became lower than public expenditure. I said above it was because of bank bailouts so I take on board that you are right to say it wasn't only due to bank bailout and. I cannot say to anon it is only because of the bank bailout, but surely as the national debt has gone up so much due to to bank bailouts in 2008 it is that combined with the lower tax receipts that means the govt have had to make savings?