Britain’s leading health thinktank and unions representing doctors said patients would lose out as a result, while the Labour Party condemned the act as a “raid” on NHS funding by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.
The Treasury confirmed that £1.4bn of £1.7bn not spent by the department on the NHS in England in 2011 and 2012, had been returned to it.
A spokesman for the Department of Health stressed that most of the £1.7bn underspend was the outcome of the NHS employing fewer managers and ministers scaling back on “wasteful” IT projects and administration costs.
Meanwhile, the shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said, “The government promised that all efficiency savings would be reinvested in the NHS, but Friday’s figures confirm George Osborne’s £1bn raid on its budget to pay for tax cuts for millionaires.”
“People will today see David Cameron for the NHS conman he is: repeatedly cutting the budget on the quiet while 4,000 nursing posts are axed and patients pay the price,” he added.
BGH/SSM/HE
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