Our hospitals don’t need empty promises. They need funding now!

The following letter was submitted to the Leicester Mercury by SONHSL supporter Tom Barker.

The NHS is facing crises on multiple fronts. Waiting lists have reached their highest levels on record, with around 6.4 million people waiting for 7.5 million treatments. Staff morale is at an all-time low, with the most recent NHS Staff Survey revealing that a third of staff want to leave within a year.

These crises are the result of so-called “tough” decisions, which have seriously undermined our NHS, made by successive Tory-led governments.

But even the Conservative Party could not avoid making concessions – in words if not in deeds – on the issue of crumbling estate. Lack of investment means that, increasingly, NHS estate is not fit for purpose. The NHS currently has a £14 billion backlog of repairs needed.

This is where the much-touted New Hospitals Programme (NHP) came from – a 2019 election pledge made by Boris Johnson to build 40 new hospitals by 2030. Unfortunately, and as we all now know, this plan was almost entirely hot air.

In Leicester, we were promised £450 million to reorganise local hospital services. University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust (UHL) was due to start work on these improvements next year, but this investment has now been considerably delayed.

In opposition, Labour opposed the NHP. When a General Election was called five years later, the Labour Party then claimed to be committed to “delivering the New Hospitals Programme”.

Wes Streeting, Labour’s Health Secretary, has now confirmed that Leicester will be getting not £450 million to reorganise and improve its hospital services, but between £1 billion and £1.5 billion!

Good news, right?

Well, the catch is that this investment will not be implemented until between 2030 and 2035.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it is because it is.

Streeting claims that he would “rather take the tough decisions which are the right decisions for the future, than lead patients up a garden path once more only for them to be let down again.”

There is nothing tough about kicking the can down the road – it is what the Tories had been doing for years.

Moreover, if the recent past has shown anything, it is that a lot can happen in 5 years and that there are no guarantees that this money will ever materialize.

There is no doubt that the public finances have been left in a terrible state, but we believe the time to be reforming taxes on wealth is long overdue.

Real tough decisions, and ones that could address the manifold crises currently facing our health service, would be to increase taxes on the super-rich to fund our NHS NOW, not at some point in the distant future!