Conservative boost to NHS 'half what was pledged in manifesto'

'In our view, the funding announced in the Spending Review does not meet the Government’s commitment'

Jeremy Hunt is one minister who has repeated the £8.4bn pledge (Getty)

The Conservative Party has only allocated an extra £4.5 billion to the health budget in England and Wales despite pledging to give a lot more, according to an influential cross-party committee of MPs.

The health select committee said the Government had given a misleading impression of how much funding is received by the NHS, with the actual figure only about half of what the Tories promised in their 2015 general election manifesto.

The Government has repeatedly vowed to spend an extra £8.4bn above inflation on the NHS to ease mounting pressures on the service. It was a key pledge laid out in the Conservative campaign, and due to be fulfilled over this term in Parliament, ending in 2020/21.

The health select committee said the Government had manipulated the figures, meaning the actual health budget was "less than would appear to be the case from official pronouncements".

The committee demanded the figures be communicated in a more transparent way. “We call on the Government to be clearer in the presentation of its funding commitments.

“In our view, the funding announced in the Spending Review does not meet the Government’s commitment," it said.

The Government has changed its definition of NHS spending since 2015/16 so it only includes money going to NHS England, excluding other NHS resources, according to the report.

Through cutting some parts of the Department of Health’s budget, such as from recruiting staff and health promotion schemes, it gave NHS England a big budget increase. The areas now excluded from the figures, for instance programmes preventing obesity, have a direct impact on frontline services.

The committee flagged the cuts to staff training as particularly worrying. It said: "We are concerned about the cuts to Health Education England at a time when the workforce shortfall is already placing a strain on services and driving higher agency cost."

The committee also said overspending in 2014/15 meant that NHS trusts were £2.5bn in deficit - meaning a large portion of the extra £4.5bn in NHS spending would simply be used to bring the NHS back into the black.

The report goes on to cast doubt about how practical the Conservative pledge for a seven-day NHS is.

"Given the constraints on NHS resources we will be reviewing whether the focus on seven-day services is delivering value for patients given the concern that it may displace measures which would be more cost effective," it wrote.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said ministers continued to back their figures. "We reject these conclusions," he said.