NHS breaking point?

[IvanV]

IFS report on the NHS staffing plan.

The plan aims to increase the number of staff employed by the English NHS from around 1.5 million in 2021–22 to between 2.3 and 2.4 million in 2036–37.
...
Increasing the size of the workforce so rapidly will likely require NHS wages to become more generous in real terms and – potentially – match or even exceed growth in wages in the rest of the economy.
...
Under a central set of assumptions, the workforce plan implies annual NHS budget increases of around 3.6% per year in real terms (or 70% in total by 2036–37).
...
In the central case, spending on the NHS in England would be around 2% of GDP higher by 2036–37,
... raising that sort of sum would require increasing the standard rate of VAT from 20% to around 27% by 2036–37 or increasing all income tax rates by around 6 percentage points.
...
the staffing increases contained in the plan will only be enough to meet NHS demand if productivity can be increased by between 1.5% and 2% per year: an extremely ambitious target ... particularly as, since the onset of the pandemic, measured productivity performance in the NHS has been even weaker.

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/implica ... force-plan

I think Jeremy *unt would probably recognise this, as he was pretty clear-headed about what the NHS needed to provide the necessary capacity when he was health secretary.

Now that he is Chancellor of a right wing government that wants to reduce tax and public expenditure, I don't see him ponying up the cash or allowing wages to rise as required. Tory chancellors have been utterly unwilling to do that for a long time. Labour seems to have boxed itself into a we-are-as-fiscally-cautious-as-the-Tories corner that prevents it doing that too, at least for a while.

They mention that this will imply an expansion in NHS delivery facilities and materials. Another thing it needs is adequate training capacity. We still have a such limited training capacity for doctors, nurses, etc, that it will take time to expand to the required training capacity.