NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens [Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA].

The NHS is still £2.4 billion short of the funding it needs.

And you’ll notice from the words below that Jeremy Hunt was apparently bidding for only £3 billion of extra funding, rather than the £4 billion that experts say is needed (at least).

So it seems that, not only did the Health Secretary deliberately endanger lives by requesting less funding than is required, but the Chancellor then more-than-doubled the danger to NHS patients by slashing even that amount – almost in half.

End result: The NHS gets just two-fifths of the conservative (ha ha) estimate of what it needs…

And we have evidence that the Conservative government is intentionally putting patients’ lives at risk.

This Writer would strongly urge staff at every NHS hospital to start recording details of patients who lose their lives because operations are delayed.

Mr Hammond might think he was clever to reprimand Mr Stevens in this way but let’s see how much he enjoys a corporate manslaughter charge.

Philip Hammond backtracked on plans to give the NHS more money than it eventually got in the budget after reacting with “fury” to its boss Simon Stevens’s public demand for an extra £4bn next year.

The chancellor viewed Stevens’s plea, in which he urged ministers to deliver on leave campaigners’ promise of £350m a week more for the NHS, as “very, very unhelpful” when he was facing so many pleas from other services for cash.

At the time of Stevens’s speech on 8 November, Hammond had already begun discussions with the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over his formal pre-budget request that the NHS in England be given a £3bn uplift for 2018-19.

But sources close to the talks say that both Hammond and Treasury officials felt that the NHS England chief executive’s move meant that the chancellor could not be seen to be acceding to what they saw as “overt public blackmail”.

“At the point when everyone else was clamouring for more money, if he gave in then to the NHS’s claim for £4bn, what was he going to say to everyone else? If Stevens hadn’t intervened the NHS would have got more. Giving in to the NHS would have made it really hard to resist everyone else who wanted more money,” said one source with knowledge of events.

Source: Hammond backtracked on funding after ‘fury’ at NHS boss’s demands | Society | The Guardian

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