NHS Needs An Extra £50bn a Year by 2030, Warns Lord Darzi

The NHS will require an extra £50bn a year by 2030 in order to meet demand, Professor Lord Ara Darzi has said.

The Labour peer’s report, published by the Institute for Public Policy Research,  on health and care added that adult social care would require an extra £10bn a year ‘as a minimum’.

The report comes as Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the government is looking to devise long-term planning for the health service to ‘put the NHS back on its long-run funding trajectory and fill the social care funding gap’ which would require ‘an extra £50bn for the NHS and £10bn on social care in tax contribution per year by 2030’. .

In response, Lord Darzi has warned that governments must “stop approaching the NHS and social care as a liability to be managed and instead look at it as investment that delivers a return”.

Lord Darzi said: “While the prospect of a long-term funding settlement is welcome, it is vital that it delivers enough money to meet the demands of the decade ahead.”

He added that “funding the NHS, while social care falls over is not an option”.

Responding to the Lord Darzi Review of Health and Care (interim report), , Cllr Izzi Seccombe, Chairman of the Local Government Association’s Community Wellbeing Board, said:

“We are pleased to see this latest considered assessment of the state of health and social care, which raises further and much-needed awareness of the critical need to resolve the long-term financial sustainability of these essential services.

“The report shows that councils have continued to deliver high quality and effective care, despite significant funding, demand and resource pressures. The task becomes ever harder as those pressures continue to mount.

“The forecast that adult social care will need an extra £10 billion by 2030 just to maintain existing service provision – a more dire position than that facing the NHS – must serve as a wake-up call for concerted action to address the serious financial challenges adult social care is experiencing now and will continue to face in years to come without a sustainable funding solution. This action requires consensus and cross-party support from across the political divide.

“We look forward to seeing the final report and its recommendations on the future funding and reform of health and social care.”