Doctors’ Strikes Played Part in £3 Billion NHS Half-Year Overspend: Report

NHS workers take part in a march from St. Thomas's Hospital to Trafalgar Square, as members of the Royal College of Nursing and the Unite union continue their strike action in a dispute over pay, in London, on May 1, 2023. Jordan Pettitt/PA Media

A think tank has calculated that doctors’ strikes played a major part in the NHS overspending by £3 billion in the first half of the year.

In a report on Tuesday, the independent health think tank Nuffield Trust also warned that the situation could rapidly deteriorate if more junior doctor and consultant strikes are called before the end of the financial year.

The trust said that the half-year estimated £3 billion overspend is the result of the NHS outstripping its day-to-day budget, covering staff pay and clinical supplies.

It said that the staffing and logistical costs of strike action by NHS staff groups has “overwhelmed this further.”

It added that despite an additional £450 million of additional funding being made available to the NHS earlier this month, the current financial situation is “precarious,” adding that patients will be “likely to feel the impact, with slower progress than hoped for on tackling waiting lists and initiatives to improve care quality and access stalled.”

Around 7.7 million people are on NHS waiting lists in England, which is the highest since records began in 2007.

Strikes

Strikes over pay and conditions among members of some unions representing NHS workers have continued all year and into the autumn.

Junior doctors, consultants, members of the Royal Society of Radiographers and of the British Dental Association, as well as workers from across the health sector, including nurses, cleaners, and porters have taken industrial action.

NHS leaders have warned that it would cause “unprecedented disruption for patients.”

In September, NHS National Medical Director Sir Stephen Powis said the health service had “never seen this kind of industrial action in its history.”

The report claimed that if additional strikes by doctors on the scale seen in the first half of this fiscal year do take place, then the deficit could grow to almost £2.4 billion, meaning the NHS “would almost certainly need to seek additional funding in the Spring.”

It noted that if strike action remains off the table for the remainder of the financial year, the NHS could expect to save around £700 million owing to a reduced overtime and temporary staff bill, as well planned efficiency savings.

“That would bring the deficit for the year down to £1.7 billion but savings beyond that are very uncertain and virtually impossible to achieve without real impacts on patients,” it added.

NHS Budget

Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs has pushed back on claims that if the NHS were “properly funded,” it would improve.

“The NHS budget is already the highest it has ever been in the health service’s history, and the UK is now firmly in the global top 10 in terms of health care spending as a proportion of GDP,” he told The Epoch Times by email.

He said that it is “astonishing how little effect this has had on the policy debates around it.”

“We still talk about how the NHS is ‘cash-strapped’ or ’starved of funds,‘ as if nothing had changed. We could spend 90 percent of GDP on health care, and we would still hear complaints about how the NHS is ’underfunded,'” he added.

“It is about time we started asking why it is that many other health care systems can manage perfectly fine with comparable spending levels,” said Mr. Niemietz.

‘Uphill Battle’

Nuffield Trust Senior Policy Analyst Sally Gainsbury said that NHS finances are “in an extremely precarious position” and that without “additional financial support from government, the NHS faces an uphill battle to balance its books this year without severely impacting the level and standard of care the public expect.”

The report called for the chancellor to make additional funding available in the upcoming Autumn Statement.

“Even without further strike action, the NHS is now on track to have a near £1.7 billion black hole in its finances, but this could be even higher, around £2.4 billion, if we see more strike action continue to the scale that we have already seen this year,” she added.

An NHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times that it did not want to comment as the report was about “funding and industrial action.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Health and Social Care for comment.