Nuffield Trust response to Chancellor's audit of public spending

Commenting on Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’s announcements today on the public finances, Nuffield Trust Chief Executive Thea Stein, said:

“High-quality health care cannot be delivered indefinitely under the shadow of industrial relations and today’s proposals on staff pay must mark a turning point in relations between government and NHS staff. Reforms to the pay review bodies are long overdue and the government’s commitment to restore confidence in the process is positive.

“But we must be under no illusion that settling on pay will come at a cost, and the Chancellor has tasked government departments to once again look for billions of pounds of savings. The Chancellor’s welcome words about long-termism and prevention make absolute sense. But problems facing the public finances continue to mean that switching from fighting fires today to preventing them burning in the future seems to be all but impossible.

“Perhaps the starkest illustration of our failure to grapple with long-term issues is social care. Here, reforms have once again been shelved. While the specific reforms scrapped today were only a partial solution, they were at least something – and the danger now is that social care remains in the long grass.

“Repeatedly, money set aside for social care reform is getting ploughed into the frontline services – and we urgently need to move social care reform from being tomorrow’s aspiration to being today’s priority. Care users and their families are feeling the effects of this right now, and the new government needs to make a statement about their intention to improve this dire situation."