Harrogate Chamber Hustings : Your Questions Answered
The Coffers are Empty : where is the funding coming from?
In preparation for the General Election to be held in less than 2 weeks, we hosted a Hustings of our own with 6 of the 7 candidates standing in the Harrogate & District constituency in attendance. This week we will reflect on the questions asked and the answers given.
Richard Burley, an executive coach asked:
The Liberal Democrats are promising to increase spending on the NHS. This is good news, but we all know that the coffers are empty. So, I would like to know when such promises are made, where is the funding coming from? What is going to be cut?
John Swales (Reform):
We believe that savings can be made in several areas. These are in our policies, but just dealing with the NHS first. The NHS does some fantastic work. I just have some reservations about how it is managed and how efficient it is when it operates. Turning to the question of where the money comes from, we would pay for all of our policies with a number of savings, foreign aid, the money and interest that we pay on the money that was printed during quantitative easing and looking to the government departments to become more efficient by reducing their expenditure by 5%. Anybody in business will know you can make savings if you must. When you're just given money to spend, it's easy to spend it. So that is what we would do. And I think the efficiencies could be found in the NHS. It might not go down very well here, but it's an exceptionally large organisation - one of the largest employers in the world, and a lot of people who working in NHS tell me that there is a lot of waste, and efficiencies can be found.
Conrad Whitcroft (Labour):
You're absolutely right. There is going to be no money left whatsoever. Mostly thanks to the Liz Truss, disastrous mini budget that cost us about £460 billion in the UK markets and led to a restarting of quantitative easing. There are so many things that we know we can change in the NHS to make it better. Ending the 8AM scramble for appointments, which is causing such delays and concerns for local people and for patients. We also need to build on those 40,000 more appointments, not by saying we've got loads of money to throw at it but expanding it into weekends. Now, there are some taxes that we can get to put a bit more money in. The abolition of the non-dominant status is going to help with that. But we also need to be absolutely honest with the British people that getting the backlogs down is our priority. It cannot happen overnight. We need to have some joined up thinking and not keep thinking about the next five years and what's going to happen in the electoral cycle. But thinking about the next 10 and the next 20. Kier Stamer talks about a decade of national renewal and he's thinking about what we can do in the long term to put the plan in place.
Tom Gordon (Lib Dem):
What we have said is we wouldn't raise VAT income tax or national insurance. There's a little bit of a mistruth about the idea that there's no more money. There is so much money in this country - it is just in the hands of the incredibly wealthy. We need to have a fair deal that actually balances the approach to how we raise taxation. In the pandemic, the richest 1% saw their wealth exponentially grow. You have the likes of Michelle Mone on a yacht that she purchased from the PPE contracts. There's so much money out there that's been wasted that should be clawed back from the pandemic. That could be used to service front lines and make sure we all get the health that we need come from it. The point that I would make is this isn't about investing in our NHS; it's about investing in people. That's why we have the NHS; it’s to make sure that every single person here and their family outside this room have access to free healthcare at the point of use. If we want a healthy economy, it starts by making sure we've got a healthy population and that's what the Liberal Democrats are about.
Paul Haslam (Independent):
This is an easy one for me because I'm going to be in the opposition so I can promise anything. I could promise billions of pounds, but I shan't; I want to take this very, very seriously because NHS has saved my life. It saved my friends' lives and I'm sure we've all got someone here we know and it's a vital part of our life. I'm a management consultant, and so my first question would be what is happening? Where is the clear governance in here and what's the project management issue? I'd be starting to ask questions about how things are run and how best to deal with it, but my concern is that we are treating symptoms and we're not treating causes and I think we need to be looking at prevention rather than the care. We need to look at invest to save. There are 1.3 billion prescriptions issued every year. There are many things to consider and it's a complex problem, but it needs a long-term solution, and it also needs a treatment of what the causes are, not just the symptom
Andrew Jones (Conservative):
We know that the finances are going to be under pressure because over the last few years we have seen an astonishing set of challenges across the global economy. The last two obviously have been Covid and the implications from the war in Ukraine. The government has spent half a trillion on support from those two things alone. That is money that needs to be paid back. It was the right thing to do, but to suggest that it's business as usual and there are substantial amounts of cash after having spent half a trillion pounds is pie in the sky.
The question Richard asks is a particularly good one. It's making sure that politicians are honest about numbers. We'll be publishing our manifesto tomorrow. That will also include a costing document. The NHS, obviously it is critical for all of us. It has also looked after me, my family, saved lives and that will apply to all of us. The NHS budget has gone up from 130 billion pounds in 2010 to 180 billion. That is a giant increase in budgets. It is clearly necessary, and we are going to have to think about how we can make that much more sustainable for the future.
Shan Oakes (Green):
I agree with prevention is better than cure. You always must review organisations and improve them. Everything can be improved of course, but the NHS is on its knees. It's doing fantastic work in really beleaguered circumstance. My friend Bill was ill over the early part of this year, and we were so impressed with what was done by clearly struggling staff with too much to do. As for taxation with the Green Party, I can give you a bit of detail here with modest changes to the tax system. For example, three interventions equalising capital gains with income tax, close the deliberate loophole in the national insurance where the wealthiest pay less and a modest wealth tax - 1% on wealth above £10 million that will bring in £50 billion a year by the end of the next parliament. There are ways to do this and it's about making the people with the broadest shoulders pay. It's not about people who can't afford it, paying a load more tax and the way that this is being discussed in the debates and so on. It is disingenuous in my view.
We would like to thank all candidates for participating in a lively and engaging discussion, and all those who asked such pertinent questions.
Thanks also to John Plummer for facilitating the meeting and Pavilions of Harrogate for hosting.
Written by Zach Greaves - Chamber Press Secretary
