FactCheck: Are the Tories exaggerating their NHS spending record?

Patrick Worrall explains:

In a BBC radio interview this morning, Theresa May was asked where the Tories would find the extra £8bn they have promised to spend on the NHS by 2020.

There is still no specific answer. The party have not pointed to a particular saving or tax rise that would cover this promise.

But Mrs May urged us to look at the Conservatives’ record on health spending over the last parliament.

She said: “If you look at the track record over the last five years, as I say, in 2010 we committed (to) that real terms increase in funding in the NHS every year. We have delivered on that.”

That’s not what the Institute of Fiscal Studies, among others, think really happened. The IFS has UK-wide real spending falling slightly between 2010/11 and 2011/12. So there wasn’t a “real terms increase in funding in the NHS every year”.

It’s true that real spending is expected to go up over the whole five years of the coalition – but by less than the £8bn the Tories have committed to spending in a single year by 2020.

This is a line the Conservatives have repeatedly stuck to in the last few days: if you doubt whether we will keep our £8bn promise, just look at our track record.

On Saturday Jeremy Hunt said: “If you look at the last five years we actually inherited an economy that was contracting, we’ve actually been able to put in real terms more than £7bn of extra funding into the NHS on an annual basis so we’re saying we are absolutely confident that we can put about the same again.”

If you think, as we do, that “on an annual basis” sounds like “every year”, this is completely untrue. It’s about £7bn over five years, not every year. And that’s according to government figures – the IFS thinks health spending has risen by less than the claimed £7bn.

So the scale of NHS funding the Conservatives have secured while in government is a lot less than what they are promising to spend in the next parliament.