General Election 2019: What does the new Government mean for healthcare?
Krittika Bhattacharya and the Health Tech Alliance ponder what election victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives will mean for healthcare and the NHS, including medical devices and innovation.
While many pollsters and political commentators predicted a Conservative majority during last week’s election, few anticipated the landslide that saw Boris Johnson deliver the biggest electoral win to the Conservatives since Margaret Thatcher in 1987, gaining 80 more seats. The Conservatives succeeded in taking control of a number of seats in Labour heartlands across the north of England and Wales, while narrowly holding many of the seats that were expected to swing to the Liberal Democrats.
The huge win means that Boris Johnson now has a clear mandate to deliver Brexit and the seemingly near impossible task of brokering a trade deal with the EU by the end of 2020. It also means, if Brexit truly is delivered, that he can focus more time and resource on domestic policy issues. With the NHS found to be the most important issue to voters this election (surpassing Brexit), he has sensibly cited the NHS as his top priority upon his victory.
The manifesto on which Johnson was elected pledged 50,000 new nurses and 40 new hospitals, but his pledges have already come under fire when it was revealed that 18,500 of the new nurses promised would actually be existing staff that they hoped to retain. The Nuffield Trust has also warned that to tackle A&E waiting time targets, the Government will really need to deliver the promised number of nurses, “even if this means more reliance on migrants than they’ve said”. Experts have also suggested that 40 hospitals will cost up to £24 billion, although the government’s estimate is £13 billion, suggesting that Johnson will have to dig deeper and make more concessions than planned if he really wants to deliver on these pledges.
For the healthtech industry the manifesto was notably missing the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill first mentioned in the Queen’s Speech in October, which fell due to the dissolution of Parliament before the election. They may still choose to take this Bill forward especially if Matt Hancock, a tech-enthusiast, remains health secretary but the new Government will likely have to toe the line between investing in innovative and headline-grabbing new technologies and ensuring that hospitals have improved basic infrastructure.
The Conservative Party’s commitments around social care was arguably less generous than both Labour and Liberal Democrats, offering an additional £1 billion per year to be split between children’s and adult social care services and the initiation of cross-party talks on long-term reform of adult social care in the first 100 days in office. Nothing further has been said on what forms these talks would take or their timescales and the King’s Fund have criticised these pledges for being unambitious and lacking detail.
The elephant in the room meanwhile, is the impact of a post-Brexit US trade deal on the health service. During the election campaign, Labour released documents that demonstrated that drug pricing and patent laws had been the subject of initial trade discussions but were unable to find proof that any agreement had been made. Although the Conservatives have been firm that NHS services and drug prices will be “off the table” in any trade agreement, opposition parties are keen to introduce legislation that would ensure the NHS is excluded from trade discussions. It remains to be seen whether government will do so, in an effort to quell concerns.
While some may therefore be sceptical about whether Johnson’s pledges will materialise into action, the Conservatives have an opportunity to build support by prioritising an issue that voters traditionally have more trust in Labour on. With many working-class Labour safe seats turning blue, Johnson may be hoping to maintain this support at future elections by proving that the NHS can be trusted to thrive under a Conservative Government.