The NHS was high profile during the election campaign Questions are being asked about the high-profile promises being made over health and social care spending by the government.
Chancellor George Osborne claimed to have increased NHS spending as well as pumping an extra £2bn into social care in the Spending Review in England.
But shadow health secretary John Healey suggests the NHS figures do not add up.
Meanwhile, campaigners fear social care may not see all the money as, overall, councils’ budgets are being cut.
The Tories made increasing NHS spending one of the central themes of the election campaign with the slogan “we will cut the debt, not the NHS”.
The government said on Wednesday it had kept to that promise – the combined capital and resource budget will rise by 0.1% a year on average in real terms throughout this parliament.
However, in a letter to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, Mr Healey said these rises ignore several extra costs the NHS is having to bear.
“More effective partnership working must be the desired outcome”
Stephen Burke Counsel and Care
He said the government is taking £1bn a year out of the NHS for social care by insisting the health service invest in services that overlap with council social services departments, such as rehab care following discharge from hospital. He accused ministers of “double counting”.
The bill for the shake-up of the health service – primary care trusts are being scrapped and GPs put in charge of local budgets – will also amount to between £2bn and £3bn over the next four years, while the VAT increase will cost £250m.
Mr Healey said: “The NHS will have to find these extra costs within a funding settlement which it is increasingly clear falls far short of what many in the NHS believed your government had promised.”
These are on top of the extra long-term pressures from the cost of new drugs, obesity and the ageing population.
Independent experts, including the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust think-tanks, agreed a case could be made for saying the small real terms rise would be swallowed up.
The Nuffield Trust also raised concerns about the extra money earmarked for social care.
A special BBC News season examining the approaching cuts to public sector spending
Of the £2bn a year extra that is being ploughed into the system by 2014, half is coming from a direct grant to local government.
But as councils are facing an overall cut of 27% in their budget from central government, the Nuffield Trust said social care may not end up seeing the extra money.
Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the think tank, said: “The reality is that local authority budgets will be stretched and funds for social care are not ring-fenced, so the extra £1bn per year is by no means certain.”
Stephen Burke, of Counsel and Care, the older people’s charity, agreed it was a risk. He also said getting the NHS and councils to work together to make sure the £1bn of NHS funds benefited social care was a “major challenge.”
He said in the past the two sectors had often failed to work together.
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