Tim Farron: We need a £4bn cash injection now to save the health and care services

The NHS and social care system are suffering a virulent illness and the cause is obvious: a chronic lack of funding. Yet the government is refusing to provide the treatment needed. Four in five hospitals are now not safe enough, we are seeing longer waits for operations, slower ambulance response times and patients delayed in hospital for days and weeks on end because the social care they need isn’t available. The sick note is a long one.

This shouldn’t really come as a shock – this ailment has been obvious to anyone who uses the system. We spend a lower proportion of our GDP on health than almost any of our European neighbours and the government propose to further slash spending, while demand continues to rise. How exactly do the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, expect services to cope? The chief inspector of the Care Quality Commission said just last week that the NHS “stands on a burning platform”. When he speaks this vividly, we should listen.

So there should be one essential priority for the chancellor when he delivers his budget on Wednesday. Save our most treasured national institution. Give the NHS and care systems the money they need.

The Liberal Democrats are calling for an emergency injection for 2017-18 of £4bn – to be split between health and social care – to bring these services back from the brink of real crisis. I don’t claim this will solve every frailty in our system, but it would be an urgent, short-term boost.

When the government faces a £100bn shortfall in public finances due to a Brexit squeeze, I realise the chancellor’s room for manoeuvre is limited; the economic situation is as grim as it is self-inflicted. But that doesn’t mean it is acceptable to leave the huge, gaping holes in our most essential social safety nets remain unrepaired. These are services we will all need, services that will be there for us when we are at our most desperate and vulnerable. We must do whatever is needed to safeguard them for generations to come.

Ultimately, we must find a long-term solution to the crisis in funding for the NHS and social care. Short-term injections of cash alone will not make services more sustainable indefinitely. That is why my colleague Norman Lamb, the former health minister, has assembled a commission of some of the country’s leading experts (don’t tell Michael Gove) to assess in more detail the scale of the financial need, and options for raising this revenue in the longer term – including through tax increases.

‘We cannot ignore a situation where NHS trusts are declaring services to be in a state of emergency.’ Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

We need a funding settlement that will stretch beyond one parliament or one economic cycle, and I am proud that my party is prepared to be honest with the public about the challenges we’re facing and to be bold in proposing realistic solutions, which the Conservative Brexit government might not think sound quick or easy, but that I am convinced are essential.

He has also reached out to politicians of other parties, asking them to join him in working to secure a long-term, sustainable funding solution for the NHS and our care services. Protecting our NHS is a slogan Labour and the Conservatives have fought countless elections under. Well, now is the time to put those words into action. And while this battle is made a lot tougher by the economic challenges posed by that painful Brexit squeeze, I am in no doubt that it is still one worth fighting.

We cannot ignore a situation where more than a million older people are not getting the care they need and NHS trusts are declaring services to be in a state of emergency. The £4bn injection might seem a relatively modest one, considering this deeply concerning diagnosis. But it might just be enough to get it out of intensive care. I hope all progressives will join me in backing my campaign to give the NHS and care the funding it deserves, and so desperately needs.

Tim Farron: We need a £4bn cash injection now to save the health and care services

People may be ready to pay extra penny on tax for NHS, Tim Farron says

People may be ready to pay an extra penny on income tax to fund the NHS and social care, Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has said.

Farron said voters had reached the stage of not believing the NHS’s problems could be solved through efficiency savings and might be willing to pay more if they were convinced it would go to the health service.

He said he did not want to pre-empt the conclusions of an independent panel formed by the Lib Dems, which will look at possible taxes to help the NHS.

But asked if he believed people would be happy to pay an extra penny on income tax to improve health services, Farron said: “Yes, potentially, if people see this as the way of solving a problem that is increasingly apparent to people.

“Health and social care personal crises in families are growing by the week. If we can convince people this is the way to meet those needs in a tangible way, then yes, I think so. I think we’ve gone past the time where we can pull the wool over people’s eyes where somehow it can be sorted out by efficiency; it can’t.”

Norman Lamb, the party’s health spokesman, said: “The expert panel I’ve set up is looking at a hypothecated health and care tax and whether we need to increase tax. We’re prepared to do both if it makes sense to do both.

“One option is to base it on national insurance – to reform national insurance to make it more progressive and fair intergenerationally. Another is to base it on income tax and separate out the money you need on income tax.”

The Lib Dems became the first major political party to examine a dedicated new tax to help rescue the NHS from its deep financial problems at their party conference this autumn.

Lamb told delegates the party would examine the wisdom and practicalities of introducing a ringfenced tax that would involve a 1p increase in either income tax or national insurance.

It has recruited a panel of senior doctors and NHS experts to advise it on how a “dedicated NHS and care tax” would help ease the health service’s decade-long financial squeeze. It includes David Nicholson, the former chief executive of NHS England.

Speaking after a visit to St Helier hospital in Sutton, south London, Farron said it was an example of a hospital that was working effectively with social care providers to reduce elderly and vulnerable people staying too long in medical care.

But he said more money was needed to solve the problems in the NHS throughout the whole country.

“They really are being efficient but there is no way given the crisis in social care that really exists that you can provide the care you would do if it was properly funded,” he said. “We should be proud of the NHS and the staff in it but we don’t have comparable funding now to many other countries we would consider to be on a level or even behind us.”

They also highlighted research by ITV News in October suggesting 70% of people would happily pay an extra 1p in every pound if that money was guaranteed to go to the NHS.

Almost half of those surveyed said that they would pay an extra 2p in the pound to bolster NHS funding, according to a survey of 1,000 people conducted by Survation.

People may be ready to pay extra penny on tax for NHS, Tim Farron says

Lib Dems will turn NHS into National Health and Care Service, says Farron

Tim Farron will tell the Liberal Democrat conference that the party would rebrand the NHS to include a fully taxpayer-funded care service, warning that governments must be honest about raising taxes to ease the healthcare crisis.

In his leader’s speech in Brighton on Tuesday, Farron will say the party needs to be honest about the costs of making social care fully government-funded.

“If the only way to fund a health service that meets the needs of everyone is to raise taxes, Liberal Democrats will raise taxes,” he will say, promising to campaign to transform the NHS into the National Health and Care Service.

“For years, politicians have chosen to paper over the cracks rather than come clean about what it will really take – what it will really cost – not just to keep the NHS afloat but to give people the care and the treatment that they deserve.

“If the great Liberal William Beveridge [1879-1963] had written his blueprint today, when people are living to the ages they are now, there is no doubt he would have proposed a National Health and Care Service.”

The party insists it believes there is enough affection for the NHS for British people to feel positive about paying more taxes, not normally seen as an election-winning strategy.

The Lib Dem leader will talk about his own grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease, saying the first home he was put in was “despicable”.

“I’ve seen enough terrible old people’s homes,” he will say. “It’s not civilised to let people slip through the net. It’s not civilised towards the people who love those people, who go out of their way to try and make their lives easier when everything else is making their lives harder. It’s not civilised and it’s not good enough.”

Earlier in the week Lib Dem health spokesman Norman Lamb told the conference the government should consider moulding national insurance into a ringfenced NHS and social care tax, to make it easier to increase the amount paid with public support.

An expert panel – which the party will call its Beveridge commission – will report back to the party in six months on the costs, but Lamb suggested the tax could mean an increase of a “an extra penny in the pound”.

Farron will say the Lib Dems “will not join the ranks of those politicians who are too scared of losing votes to face up to what really needs to be done”.

“We will go to the British people with the results of our Beveridge commission and we will offer a new deal for health and social care, honest about the cost, bold about the solution.”

Earlier on Monday, Lamb announced cross-party support for a commission into the NHS funding crisis, backed by Labour MP and former leadership contender Liz Kendall, and Tory MP Dan Poulter, a former gynaecologist.

Speaking to the Lib Dem conference in Brighton, Kendall said it would be politically difficult to dedicate a new tax to the NHS. “It’s very tough for anybody in any party to say any tax should go up,” she said.

“That’s the reality, however passionately we might think this is the right solution, but certainly when Labour was in government and we did the penny on NI [national insurance] for the NHS, it was a semi-hypothecation to say it’s going to go on this specifically. It’s an important option.”

Lib Dems will turn NHS into National Health and Care Service, says Farron