Roger Godsiff – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Roger Godsiff on 2016-09-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of GDP the Government plans to spend on health care in each of the next four years.

Mr Philip Dunne

Spend as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is stated on United Kingdom public expenditure figures and is produced by HM Treasury. The Department of Health is responsible for reporting on health spend in England and is not in a position to provide equivalent spend figures for health by the devolved administrations in future years.

The Spending Review settlement, delivered by the Chancellor in November 2015, set the Department’s overall budget for the remaining years of the parliament and the level of funding that will be available to the National Health Service. It set absolute spending totals, not spending as a percentage of GDP, providing certainty for financial planning over the period, according to the plans set out by the NHS itself, in the 5 Year Forward View.