For most public sector staff the budget will make little difference. The government adds £20bn more for health over five years, then waves £650m more for social care. But at the end of Philip Hammond’s show, public services are still far from fully clothed.
Available money that could have saved services was instead used to seduce taxpayers; the fiscal sustainability of ageing Britain remains as bleak as ever. The size of the public sector will at best stay constant as a proportion of GDP: this depleted state is the new normal.
You could still admire the chancellor’s footwork. Hammond may not be much of a mover but he has political dexterity or, to call it by another name, cynicism. He covered a lot of bases, from potholes to data science, allowing his party faithful to make large claims on the back of slender commitments.
On inspection, the headlines lose their allure. The actual increase in NHS spending is less than the 3.6% real terms increase promised; much of the money will go to prop up yesterday’s deficits, not tomorrow’s need to spend. The government says the cash will win parity of esteem for mental health and has made large, overdue promises about children’s and young people’s crisis teams and jobs support for adults.
But where are the staff going to come from? How will NHS England guarantee that local commissioners of healthcare don’t again siphon off the money for other urgent needs, especially acute hospitals?
Further down the track, if the NHS pay bill rises, as it surely must if needed staff are to be recruited, will the extra cost be carried by the Treasury or, as in the past, partly deducted from trusts’ budgets?
And while PFI is now dead, existing financial obligations will be draining money from trusts and councils for a long, long time.
Away from health, nothing fundamental has changed across the broader public sector. Local government goes on bearing the brunt of austerity, despite the bung for social care and potholes.
The Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Justice still face disproportionate cuts in resources, but there are yet more Brexit-related jobs. There’s nothing here for police or prisons.
Saying, as the chancellor did, that these services should wait for the 2019 spending review is disingenuous. Given the relative generosity of the settlement for defence and the Brexit departments, a large slice of the available money has already been pre-empted; next year’s review will be a truncated one that cannot restore policing or libraries.
Raising the minimum wage will eat into the rise in social care budgets. And just how far will public employers be supported, as promised, in meeting the threatened increases in pension payments?
Which councils will end up benefiting from the combined effects of the adjustments to business rates plus the earmarked distributions for transport and social care? Given the suspicious alignment of previous beneficiaries and Conservative control, it looks like those councils that have already lost out will be losing out again.
