GDP tour: The Chancellor conceives of extra NHS funding, funded tax cuts and a recovery for women
From the southwest to the northwest, the Chancellor parked the statistics and the graphs: and invited Sky News to tour the country ahead of the GDP figures to promote his “recovery for women” tour. Top of the gender agenda: a large funding announcement for top £150m of NHS scientific research in Exeter. He met volunteer patients for clinical trials in Exeter. What could be more entrepreneurial than a joint NHS-University-private sector initiative to offer academics and the pharma industry seeking to find cures and treatments for an ageing society access to Devon’s greyer-that-average population?
The Chancellor gave out prizes to female scientists, and inspected the work of Katie Lannan, a scientist tempted from London by the new facilities and funding, trying to tag genes to help deal with dementia and Alzheimer’s. All this, though, on a day when it was revealed that the NHS would require £8bn in annual real rises in funding to avert a future crisis.
So far the Conservatives have only promised to raise funding in line with inflation: effectively a real freeze. The man who hopes to still hold the purse strings says the £8bn number in the Stevens report is conceivable: “I’m not setting out today the exact spending plans for coming years. But I would note this. If you achieved a similar increase in funding over the coming four or five years as we have achieved in this parliament, and you achieve the ambitious efficiency plans that Simon Stevens has identified, then you meet the conditions of this report… Simon Stevens sets the parameters for a grown up debate ahead of the general election. The English NHS is not in crisis today but there clearly are pressures. It is funding on a scale that is possible to conceive our country affording”.
In Stockport, Gemma another entrepreneur who had used a business startup loan in 2012 to set up an environmentally friendly, stylish, new social business selling timber framed garden buildings. Her business was created during the Coalition. She is sympathetic to the more typical “Mumsnet vote” approach to the Conservatives “problem with women”, which has critiqued cuts to child benefit and working tax credits. But she is even more impressed with the business support her social enterprise has enabled that enables her to create jobs. Osborne has her vote, in the Tory target seat of Hazel Grove.
The battle to connect with women voters, is part of a more general issue for the chancellor and the PM. The economic recovery as measured by GDP, is firing ahead, and has been for over a year now. Yet no follow through in the polls. After the long awaited Tory tax cut, well received speeches compared to the Opposition the polls have a gain settled in Ed Miliband’s favour. It is still a voteless recovery, women are just one group for whom the Conservatives are trying to “operationalise” the recovery. First time buyers, and pensioners have had an “offer” too. But dark clouds loom from Europe with a possible recession in Germany. Income tax receipts in the UK are very weak, way out of kilter with the strong growth figures too. There are growing pressures on public spending as exemplified by the NHS report. And then there is that £7bn unfunded tax cut. Even the Chancellor’s own LibDem treasury deputy Danny Alexander has been piling on the fiscal pressure, saying that the British people will “treat harshly” any party that offers unfunded tax cuts. “The [tax cuts] are not unfunded deficit funded tax cuts. I’m saying I would fund them from reductions in public spending. I’m not proposing to borrow more.
Back in Devon a Christmas tree farm where another female entrepreneur Sadie is pioneering mini trees for children. I ask the Chancellor if all these successful female entrepreneurs are really the answer to the fact that three fifths of lowpaid workers are women, and a majority of those on zero hours contracts. He says the female employment levels are at a record high, that skilled employment is the bulk of it, and that he intends to grow childcare places in order to help create half a million new women’s jobs so that the female employment rate in Britain rises to that of Germany.
No panic over the stubbornness of the polls? “People know it’s a critical moment with the GE there’s a real choice between stability and progress with Conservative long term economic plan and with ed miliband a return to economic chaos. The more people focus on that choice the more confident I am people will choose a Conservative government after the next election”. So far though, neither men nor women are making any such choice. And Mr Osborne seemed brace for more bad news in Rochester and Strood, but claimed to be heartened by the doorstep reaction to the government economic plan, and the lack of enthusiasm for Mr Miliband. But he’ll need a more than a year’s decent GDP figures to keep his job.
