Long-term plan for NHS funding delayed amid Brexit chaos

The government’s chaos over Brexit has forced NHS leaders to delay publication of the health service’s long-term plan.

The document, which will set out how the NHS in England will spend the £20.5bn budget increase Theresa May has promised, was due to come out early next week, but that has been postponed until January.

Well-placed sources said the immersion in the Brexit process in Downing Street and the Treasury meant they lacked the “bandwidth” to properly consider the plan, which ministers hope will generate positive headlines.

Further tension between the NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, and ministers over how ambitious the plan will be – first reported by the Guardian last week – had also held things up, sources added.

The plan will not emerge until 7 January at the earliest – the day MPs return to parliament after their Christmas and new year break. Ministers are aware that launching it in January, with the NHS’s annual “winter crisis” likely to be unfolding, carries risks.

Downing Street is thought to hope that publication in January will help the prime minister start 2019 on an upbeat note by talking about something other than Brexit.

She pledged in June to increase the NHS’s budget by £20.5bn a year by 2023-24 as part of a five-year funding deal she unveiled to coincide with the service’s 70th birthday in July. But she told NHS England to come up with a detailed plan to use the money to improve key areas of care, notably cancer and mental health.

Stevens has privately cautioned ministers that the £20bn will not pay for all the improvements they want, especially to treatment waiting times, as the problem of understaffing grows.

One NHS hospital trust boss said: “It’s been delayed and it’s down to Brexit and bickering. None of this surprises us and, if we see it in January, we will be lucky. I’m sure the expectations from No 10 on what we’ll be asked to do for the £20bn will be unrealistic and I hope that is what Simon is trying to prevent.”

NHS trust bosses had been summoned to meetings next Wednesday and Thursday to be given a detailed insight into the plan. It is unclear if they will now go ahead.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health and social care secretary, said: “This is a government dismally paralysed by the ongoing Tory civil war over the Brexit shambles. It will be an utterly embarrassing failure of leadership if the health secretary can’t get an NHS plan published because of the ongoing squabbling.

“A&Es are already overcrowded at unsafe levels this winter, waiting lists are getting longer and staff shortages across the NHS becoming more chronic. We need urgent action now.

“If the government can’t even get its proposals for the NHS agreed internally, then it should stand aside for a Labour government that will put patients first over this debilitating Tory civil war.”