Jon Ashworth: Election showed voters are willing to pay more tax to fund the NHS
The election proved that voters are willing to pay more tax in order to fund the National Health Service, Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth has said.
The Shadow Health Secretary said the result in June represented an “important moment” for Labour, with the party receiving 40% of the vote on a manifesto pledging to raise taxes on high earners.
Mr Ashworth said his party was “very stung” by the 1992 election campaign led by Neil Kinnock, which was hampered by Tory attack ads warning of tax bombshells under a Labour government.
He was speaking alongside his colleague Justin Madders, the Shadow Health Minister, at last night's Health and Care Policy Forum reception at the Labour party conference in Brighton, which ran in partnership with the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Medical Protection Society and Tunstall.
Labour pledged to spend £6bn a year extra on the NHS raised from imposing higher taxes on the top 5% of earners ahead of the vote on 8 June.
Reflecting on the party’s election platform, Mr Ashworth said: “We said we were going to make different decisions on taxation. That was actually quite an important moment; because the history of the Labour party since 1992 was that ‘you can’t go into an election campaign and promise to put up tax, because you’re inevitably going to lose that general election’.
“We were all, in the Labour party, very stung by what happened to Neil Kinnock in 1992.
“Yes, we didn’t win the general election, but my God, it was much closer than people anticipated. I actually think we struck a chord.
“I think now people are prepared to pay a little bit extra, particularly if they’re at the better off end of the spectrum, for the National Health Service, which is why we said the 5% of wealthiest people would pay more in tax to fund the National Health Service.”
At the Health and Policy Forum debate this morning, Mr Madders added: “I think we have to give the public a bit more credit than they sometimes get for actually understanding the argument that these things all cost money and they’ve got to be paid for.
“I think that tax rises across the board are not where we’re at. Asking those who’ve got the most to pay a bit more is something that I think the majority, particularly when they can see it’s going on very important issues that people feel very strongly about, is something we can take as a positive.”
LITIGATION
In a wide-ranging interview in front of a packed audience in the Hilton Brighton Metropole Hotel on Monday, Mr Madders also suggested Labour would look into the causes behind the rise in the cost of clinical negligence in the NHS.
Last year the health service spent £1.7bn on litigation, with forecasts predicting the figure could rise to as much as £3bn by the end of the decade.
In seeking to explain the rise, Mr Madders said the UK is now a “more litigious society”, but also suggested that “defensive” NHS trusts call in lawyers too quickly when a complaint is lodged.
The Shadow Health Minister said Labour would look to put NHS staffing on a much “sounder footing” to ensure workers have enough time to do their jobs when they’re on shift to prevent errors.
“The other issue is how the NHS responds to these kinds of issues. I don’t think everyone who has an actionable event is looking to compensation. I think a lot of patients actually just want to know why it went wrong and want reassurance that it won’t happen again,” he said.
“But, quite often, there is a defensiveness, understandably. I think that’s a wider question about how our litigation system works, which is I think probably where we do need some more joined up working. There is I think a defensive in Trusts.”
He added: “Obviously the individual professionals have their own careers to think about. The Trusts think about the financial consequences and of course at this point they call the lawyers in.
“The people have made the complaint or raised the concern, then think well, I better get a lawyer. That’s where we get into protracted disputed where there are frankly lots of costs, lots of delay and quite often at the end of it, lots of compensation to those who have been wronged… if you have suffered from a negligent action.
“But that’s not always what people wanted to sort of bring their claim for in the first place.”
Elsewhere in the event, Mr Madders said the Labour party would review calls for more hospital beds and seek to replace “unaccountable” Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships in the NHS.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
