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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Yes, I am saying that, because the question the public are asking is: where has all the money gone? It tells us everything about the Government’s failure on public services that in the Chancellor’s last Budget—his great swansong as Chancellor—he barely mentioned the national health service. Out there in the country it is the biggest political issue of the day. Pick up a local newspaper almost anywhere in the country and it will be full of articles about hospitals facing closure, maternity wards under threat, nursing posts being axed and junior doctors up in arms, yet the NHS hardly features at all in the national newspaper coverage of the Budget. For the Chancellor, it has become the health service that dare not speak its name. That is because he has no one but himself to blame for the monumental waste of public money and the meddling and interfering that have sent NHS staff morale plummeting, and for the old-fashioned, top-down attempt to control everything from Whitehall that has ended up with a health service in crisis. The Chancellor could not even give us the spending figures for the coming three years. Why not? We have had the figures for the Home Office, the Treasury, the Department for Constitutional Affairs and, yesterday, the Department for Education and Skills—no doubt the Secretary of State will be talking about that later—so why not the NHS? The Chancellor must have done the sums if he has done them for the other Departments. Presumably he is keeping the NHS figures back only for political reasons, so that he can deploy them later in the year. People who are already struggling with financial deficits in the NHS should have firm financial planning horizons. One Budget measure that will affect the NHS has not really had an airing yet. It is buried in table A2, on page 210, and is called ““Tackling Managed Service Companies””. That is Brown-speak for a stealth tax that will raise £350 million next year and £450 million the year after. Will the Secretary of State for Education and Skills confirm that the biggest user of managed service companies in the country is the NHS? Will he explain to the Chancellor that if he puts their taxes up they will put their fees up and that hospital trusts will end up footing the Bill for his entirely self-defeating stealthy manoeuvre? Of course, the Chancellor talked about education. Can the Education Secretary confirm that despite all the spin in yesterday’s Budget statement it is clear from page 139 that education spending growth is set to halve to 2.5 per cent., below the growth rate of the economy? That means that the share of national income devoted to education is set to fall, yet the 2005 Labour manifesto promised:"““We will continue to raise the share of national income devoted to education.””" Perhaps the Education Secretary could explain the contradiction between the Budget and the manifesto? While the Chancellor was talking about how much money he would put into education, he did not say a word about how it would be spent—not an inkling that he understood what a waste it has been to throw money at education without also achieving reform. That was not how it was supposed to be. Earlier this week the Blairites were in ecstasy. They thought they had finally got the Chancellor to sign up to city academies, finally got him to commit himself in public to something that he has spent the past year bad-mouthing in private. Just wait for the Budget, we were told—Gordon’s going to commit to education reform—