NHS funding for a secure future
Demands on the NHS continue to increase, and difficult decisions have to be made on how much we want to spend and how to finance that spending to ensure its stability Worries about the sustainability of NHS funding have a long history. Just five years after the NHS opened its doors, amid concern about escalating spending on the NHS, the then Conservative government set up an independent commission led by Claude Guillebaud to examine the costs of the NHS. That inquiry found that spending remained sustainable even though it had increased, and actually recommended that extra investment was needed in hospitals and community services.1 At the time of the Guillebaud inquiry, NHS spending represented 3.2% of gross domestic product (GDP).2 More than seven decades later, spending has outstripped the growth in GDP so that by 2022 we spent around 9.3% of GDP on the NHS.3 This growth has been driven in part by additional demand (the UK population has increased by around a fifth since the 1950s, fo