Curb NHS spending pledge to save other services, says Andy Burnham

Schools and social care ‘could be badly hit’ by plans to increase health spending year on year, says shadow health secretary

Labour leadership campaign Andy Burnham during a debate between the Labour leader candidates organised by the New Statesman. Photograph: Katie Collins/PA

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, today urged the government to withdraw plans to increase NHS spending in real terms year on year, saying that otherwise the commitment would visit real damage on other services, such as social care.

Ahead of the emergency budget next week he told the Guardian: “If this goes ahead they will hollow out social care to such a degree that the NHS will not be able to function anyway, because it will not be able to discharge people from hospital.

“If they persist with this councils will tighten their eligibility criteria even further for social care. There will be barely nothing left in some parts of the country, and individuals will be digging ever deeper into their own pockets for social care support.”

NHS spending currently makes up one sixth of all public spending, but the coalition has not yet quantified how much extra spending on the NHS it would allow year on year.

During the last general election Labour said it would increase spending on front-line services in the NHS only in line with inflation. In addition, the Labour government proposed finding £15bn-£20bn in efficiency savings to try to relieve the extra pressure on the NHS.

Burnham said that fulfilling the pledge to increase NHS spending would “necessarily inflict very large cuts on everyone else, including care and older people”. In some cases the cuts would be so bad they would “damage services beyond repair”.

Ironically, Burnham’s views have been echoed by some Tories in the past.

Burnham accepted it was “counter-intuitive for a health spokesman to be advocating less spending on the NHS”.

He said he assumed the Conservative commitment on the spending would lead to extra NHS expenditure, amounting to more than 1% a year, coming to more than £4bn over the parliament, which would mean even larger reductions for schools and local government.

He added: “The only reason I think they made the commitment was due to the toxicity of health for them ahead of the election, and they wanted to break a political problem.

“The commitment was more to do with political expediency than logic or policy making. I don’t think it is what people in the Treasury and Department of Health would have expected to happen. It is born of a view of the world that you can treat health spending separately from other departments, but the direction of travel at local level is to integrate health and social services.

“To have … the NHS in a much stronger financial position to everyone else makes joint working much harder, and is unsustainable.”

He said he was also responding to claims by the chancellor, George Osborne, that no one in the Labour leadership campaign was being responsible over how to deal with the large deficit.

Burnham said: “I am putting the ball right back in [Osborne’s] court. It is irresponsible to increase NHS spending in real terms within the overall financial envelope that he, as chancellor, is setting.

“The effect is that he is damaging, in a serious way, the ability of other public services to cope: he will visit real damage on other services that are intimately linked to the NHS. The health service needs functioning day care, and housing and meals.”

Before the election Burnham was rebuffed by his own side when he called for a compulsory levy on estates to fund social care. He was overruled in the cabinet after the Tories made it clear they planned to mount a “death tax” campaign.

The coalition government has not yet specified how it plans to fund social care in the future.