"The Chancellor must surely recognise that you can’t fix the economy without fixing our NHS."
- Daisy Cooper MP, Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson
The Liberal Democrats have put forward an amendment to the government’s National Insurance Contributions (NICs) Bill to exempt healthcare providers from the proposed tax hike. This would protect social care, hospices, NHS GPs, dentists, and pharmacies from additional tax – which could cost GP surgeries the equivalent of over 2mn appointments each year if faced with this additional £12.5mn tax bill.
Nuffield Trust estimates that healthcare providers will have to pay £900mn annually – this is higher than the additional £600mn allocated to social care in the Budget. When paired with planned increases to National Minimum Wage rates, 18k independent organisations providing adult social care in England could be forced to pay £2.8bn in additional costs over the next twelve months.
“Due to a series of financial black holes in almost every corner of the public sector, the government faced the unenviable task of urgently raising funds at the Budget to plug them. But by choosing not to provide support to adult social care providers in covering the costs of the rise in NICs, the result is likely to be catastrophic,” warned Natasha Curry, Deputy Director of Policy at the Nuffield Trust.
The Liberal Democrats have branded the government’s proposed NICs Bill as “self-defeating” as it’ll “only inflict more misery on patients.” The party has urged Rachel Reeves to rethink the tax hike or risk “making the crisis in health & social care even worse.”
Daisy Cooper MP, Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson, added: “Thanks to years of neglect by the Conservatives, patients have been left to suffer. The Chancellor must surely recognise that you can’t fix the economy without fixing our NHS. All this tax hike will do is pile more pressure on our healthcare services which are already on the brink of collapse.
“The government must urgently rethink this decision, back our amendment to exempt vital health & social care providers from this tax increase, and focus on getting people off waiting lists and back into work,” she concluded.
