Healthcare

Following widespread austerity measures introduced in 2009/10, public funding for adult social care has fallen substantially. In particular, funding for social care for people aged 65 and older has been particularly hard hit, falling by 21% between 2009/10 and 2015/16. While some additional money in recent years has reversed some of these cuts, these funding decisions are likely to have had a number of consequences for users of social care, their carers and for other related public services. But what do we really know about their impact?

Ministers will have to make unpopular decisions on taxation to raise health service funding, says Thomas Pope of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

How should we fund social care? When you try to answer such a big question, you quickly realise there are a whole host of underlying questions one needs to think about.

Over the past 50 years we’ve pulled off a pretty remarkable trick. We have spent an ever growing fraction of our national income on the welfare state in general, and on health in particular, without apparently having to pay for it. The tax burden, at about 34 per cent of GDP, is not substantially higher now than it was half a century ago. The same is true of total government spending. As a fraction of national income it’s much the same as it was in the mid-1960s.

This article by Paul Johnson, published in the Times Newspaper, looks at the issue of hypothecating taxes for the NHS.

Maternity units in England operate at 100% capacity much of the time. When capacity is breached, units may occasionally have to close temporarily to new admissions, causing stress to women in labour and undermining their choice over where to have their babies. New work by IFS unpicks some of the causes of closures.

Presentation given at Wellcome Trust seminar.

The Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos all contained commitments to increase NHS spending over the next parliament. In this observation we set out what these commitments are likely to mean for the path of health spending in England going forwards, and put this in the context of the pressures faced by the health service from an ageing population. All three parties are proposing real increases in health spending over the next parliament, but at a rate well below the long run historical average. The next parliament will therefore continue to be an incredibly challenging period for the NHS, regardless of who wins the election. In the long run the NHS would be better served by a serious attempt to address long run funding pressures in a coherent and systematic fashion, than by the government just announcing further short term funding fixes.

In a new article in the Local Government Chronicle, IFS Associate Director looks at the tension between localised funding and centralised standard-setting in social care. The article is available here and reproduced below.