Victoria Macdonald: Why won’t Labour commit to the £8 billion NHS plug?
In the very fine surroundings of the British Library, the health leaders have been put up in front of a group of health experts, think tanks, patient groups and health journalists.
Jeremy Hunt was late arriving (when he arrived he raised a laugh by saying there had been ‘a toxic, top down reorganisation of the London traffic that nobody wanted or voted for).
So it was up to Andy Burnham to kick off with that other toxic subject: why Labour isn’t committing to the £8bn gap in funding by 2020.
He says it’s about making changes to the way NHS finances work and that will happen, he says, through integration and making the default place for care to be at home.
Norman Lamb wants a non-partisan commission of all parties, patient and staff groups and unions to come up with a new settlement for the NHS and care
Julia Reid for UKIP says ‘despite what some people say’ they want and NHS free at the point of use’. Of course, the critics only say that because of UKIP’s previous discussions on charging.
Finally, Jeremy Hunt says when faced with the ‘horror of Mid-Staffs’ the Government has made this the safest system in the world.
But to deal with the growing elderly population, there needs to be the funding and ‘we can do that with a strong economy’.
When you cut through the debate over £8bn, there seems to be less between the parties than you might imagine. There needs to be better integration between health and care and that the growing elderly population is going to cost a lot of money.