Health ministers from all three main Westminster parties have refused to give a commitment to find an extra £8bn-a-year funding sought by the chief executive of NHS England in a major report looking at the looming cost pressures facing the NHS in the next five years.
The political class all embraced the reports principles, often arguing it endorsed their existing political positions, but they all shied away from a commitment to £8bn.
Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health minister, said: There needs to be a fundamental review of funding for the NHS. He said it should start next year on an all-party basis so there was a national discussion about some of the big choices we have to make. We have to meet that gap one way or another.
Andy Burnham, the shadow health minister, said he could not at this stage commit to £8bn, but said Labours £2.5bn Time to Care fund allied to his plans fully to integrate health and social care would get the party on the way to the £8bn.
He cited figures by Monitor suggesting full integration would save £4-6bn, saying this gets you a significant amount of the way that Simon Stevens has identified. He added the government had been wrong to reject the advice from the nurses and midwives pay review body recommending a 1% pay rise.
He said these new revenues meant Labour would not have to cut other department budgets or increase borrowing.
George Freeman, the minister for life sciences, said in government we have put £12bn extra in this parliament adding that David Cameron at the Conservative party conference had agreed not just to ring fence NHS expenditure but increase it in real terms.
He said: What this report invites us to do is to think more profoundly about how we evolve and change healthcare. The central way to fund the NHS is to have a strong economy.
Bruce Keogh, the NHS England medical director said unless the savings are made and unless the NHS gets the appropriate support both financially and politically there is a risk that services will have to change, may be cut, there will be shortages of staff and there will be issues with waiting times, and there is a risk that we will have to restrict treatments.
Earlier, rival politicians rushed to claim ownership of the Stevens report .
Making a statement to the Commons at the request of Labour, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said the report was an excellent blueprint on which all parties could largely agree, before adding it exposed Labours plans for the NHS as shallow party politicking.
He accused Burnham, of Houdini-like spin in claiming the report showed the NHS was on the brink of collapse. Hunt said the report argued the NHS has been remarkably successful in weathering the pressures of recent years, adding it made no mention of competition and privatisation being a threat to the NHS, a claim often made by Burnham.
He added that Stevens report begs Burnham not to make big structural changes to the NHS or call for a repeal of the Health and Social Care Act, and said it calls for real-terms annual increases to the NHS along the lines the coalition government had been making in this parliament. He said the big message of the report was agreed between the parties the need for integration of health and social care, improving investment in primary care, more GPs and more care closer to home.
Hunt claimed the public want a more measured and sensible debate, and this would be helped if the parties spoke more often about the issues in the heath service on which they agree, rather than constantly pretending there are vast disagreements.
But Labour, determined to make the NHS a central issue in the general election, said the report was an endorsement of the agenda developed by Burnham, who said it showed GP services had been under-resourced and that Labour had found funds for an extra 8,000 GPs by 2020.
