The £8bn NHS funding gap highlighted in the Five Year Forward View will be met if the Conservative party win the election according to the Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt.
If successful on polling day the party plans to put a total of £30 billion into the NHS – £22 billion will be found through efficiency savings and £8bn will be in extra spending. Before this only the Liberal Democrats had pledged to find the cash.
Hunt claimed in an interview with The Sunday Times that, “The gap might be more than £8bn, it might be less. That will all be settled in the summer when we do the spending-round discussions. We will continue to spend more in real terms year in, year out”.
According to Hunt, the Tories will back the Forward View drawn up by NHS England’s chief executive Simon Stevens.
“We said to Simon Stevens, how much do you need for your plan next year, the first year of your five-year plan? He said £1.7bn, and we actually found him £2 billion.
“We’ve demonstrated that we’re as good as our word. At the last election we were the only party that promised to protect the NHS budget. We didn’t just protect it, we increased it,” he said.
