NHS in England to receive £1.5bn next year to boost appointments

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The NHS in England will receive £1.5bn next year to deliver 2mn extra appointments in the Budget, although health secretary Wes Streeting warned the funding would only “arrest the decline” of the struggling health service.

The extra money will go towards capital investment, including new surgical hubs and scanners, boosting access to care and diagnostics and new radiotherapy machines to improve cancer treatments, the Treasury said on Monday.

It will be part of a multibillion pound annual package designed to strengthen the health service that Rachel Reeves will set out in the Budget on Wednesday.

Ministers have refused to say exactly how much money the NHS will receive for the 2025-26 financial year in the fiscal event, where the chancellor is expected to outline a wave of investment in public services.

But officials have said a significant share of the £20bn to be raised from increasing employers’ national insurance contributions will go to the health service.

Streeting said he could not promise that “there won’t be people waiting on trolleys and corridors this winter” but promised to “start planning for next winter, this winter”.

“What this Budget will enable us to do is arrest the decline in the NHS and start fixing the foundation so we cannot only get the NHS back on its feet, but make sure it’s fit for the future,” he said.

The new money will come on top of £1.8bn allocated to the NHS since the start of July by the Treasury, aimed at increasing the availability of elective treatments such as knee replacements and cataract surgery.

Reeves will also outline a £240mn cash injection to accelerate the rollout of local services to encourage disabled people and those registered long-term sick into work, the Treasury said in a separate announcement on Monday.

Reeves on Monday said that one fiscal event could not “undo 14 years of damage” to the health service but vowed to put “an end to the neglect and under-investment” by the previous Conservative government.

“We will be known as the government that took the NHS from its worst crisis in its history, got it back on its feet again and made it fit for the bright future ahead of it,” she told reporters on a visit to St George’s hospital in Tooting, south London, with Streeting.

In a damning government-commissioned report last month, Lord Ara Darzi found that NHS patients across England were waiting too long for treatment, with patients waiting for 7.6mn appointments in August, including 280,000 people who had been waiting for more than a year.

The surgeon and former health minister attributed the “critical condition” of the health system in large part to government austerity policies of the 2010s, which slashed public spending in a bid to cut the budget deficit.  

One of Labour’s five missions for government is to “build an NHS fit for the future”, and the first step towards that is the commitment to offer 40,000 extra appointments a week to cut waiting times. 

To emphasise the scale of the task, Reeves this month took the unusual step of naming the health service as one of her top priorities for the Budget.

Separately, health officials said they were confident the NHS would receive a real-terms increase of at least 4 per cent for 2025-26 on Wednesday, which would amount to roughly £7bn. 

“The key is whether it’s above or below the minimum that is needed just to stand still,” said one. The official also questioned whether any rise would take account of deals agreed by the government with junior doctors this year, which are estimated to cost about 2 per cent of the NHS budget in 2024-25.

In a report published last week, the Nuffield Trust estimated that Reeves would need to announce a real-terms increase of at least 3.6 per cent “just to keep the NHS on an even keel”.

Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at the health think-tank and author of the report, identified a £4.8bn unfunded shortfall in NHS England’s revenue budget for 2024-25, driven by “higher-than-planned-for staff pay deals”.

The Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment.