The UK’s ageing population, and the ever-rising cost of new treatments, means NHS spending never actually falls year-on-year – despite politicians endlessly accusing each other of “cuts”.

Instead, the NHS spend grows at different rates at different times. And, by this measure, the extent to which New Labour has spent on our health service becomes extremely clear.

Under the Thatcher and Major Tory administrations, real spending – after inflation – grew by between 2 and 4 per cent a year. But Labour’s increases cranked up that average to almost 5 per cent after 1997, and more than 7 per cent after 2001.

As Chancellor, Gordon Brown drove through all that new money. Now, as Prime Minister, his chance of winning an election depends in part on the public’s perception of how those extra billions have been spent.

It must be galling for Brown, then, that a recent Guardian poll suggested 44 per cent of the public thought the NHS would deteriorate under Labour, but only 35 per cent under the Tories.

Labour is used to “leading” on health. The creation of the NHS after the Second World War is, perhaps, the party’s proudest achievement.

More seriously for Brown, NHS resources are set to tighten considerably over the next few years. A new financial settlement, to be announced next month, will reduce spending growth, perhaps by half, but certainly to no more than 5 per cent.

At that point, voters will start asking if Brown’s NHS spending splurge has been squandered. The UK now spends around 9 per cent of our national income on health when private care is included – equal to the European average. Yet the NHS lurches from crisis to crisis.

The Labour government’s reputation on health took a bad knock after 2005 when big deficits appeared across the service. Earlier this year, almost half of all NHS trusts were in the red – with the total cash shortfall of £1.3bn.

Ministers clamped down, imposed “minimum waiting times” on at least two-fifths of the NHS’s acute hospital. The British Medical Association said this was “crazy”. Operations and other treatments were being delayed for months, it said, even though staff and equipment were available, “just to make the accountants’ numbers add up”.

Since then, the NHS has swung back into surplus. But, over the summer, evidence has continued to emerge suggesting “health” may not be the sure-fire electoral asset which Labour has long assumed.

One of Britain’s leading trauma surgeons broke cover to expose a national shortage of emergency beds – meaning thousands of serious injury victims are left in agony. And there were more signs that, despite now spending more per head than France and Germany on cancer, our survival rates remain poor.

The NHS continues to lag behind Europe when it comes to diagnostic cancer scans, time to first treatment and access to radiotherapy and cancer drugs.

Then, later in the summer, the head of NHS information technology – the UK’s highest paid civil servant – suddenly resigned. While the Government’s ambitious plans to harness IT to improve health care are bearing some fruit, parts of the project remain years behind schedule and total costs are heading for £20bn – £7bn over budget.

No one ever said running the NHS is easy. And even number-crunchers like me would be foolish not to recognise the expertise and dedication of countless NHS staff. But, as the political season restarts, and with health set to take centre-stage, it’s worth wondering if the tens of billions of pounds we’ve just thrown at the NHS could have been better spent. I think it could.

By Liam Halligan, Economics Editor, Sunday Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/09/09/ccliam109.xml

This voter distrust of labour’s NHS funding has been going on for a while. On Tue 28 Nov 06 Health Direct posted: Labour continues to pay the price for it’s NHS cutbacks and closures with the voters as the public remains deeply sceptical over the government’s ability to improve public services and the economy, according to the latest findings from Ipsos Mori’s public delivery index.

A mere 19 per cent of adults believe the National Health Service is getting better, against 46 per cent who believe it is worsening. Just one person in 100 believes the NHS will get better over the next few years, against 13 who believe it will get much worse. (Which proves the adage that you can fool some of the people some of the time- but eventually people will see through the spin and lies.)

“Labour’s standing on public services is not quite in free fall,” Sir Robert Worcester, founder of MORI said. “But the public is clearly disenchanted with Labour’s ability to improve public services after nine years in office. Its figures are down and continuing to fall.”