According to Treasury documents seen by The i Paper, money earmarked for “capital expenditure” used to improve medical and education facilities is being used to help fund the multi-billion-pound pay deals Reeves made shortly after Labour took office.
In July, Reeves agreed a 5.5 per cent pay rise for teachers and an average 4.05 per cent pay rise for doctors.
Shadow education minister Neil O’Brien criticised the Government for cutting critical building programmes to prioritise pay deals.
According to the spending documents, £575m worth of cuts were made to capital budgets for academies and local authority grants to schools.
square POLITICS Four ways Labour could cut the benefits bill – and how it could backfire
Read More
Sally Gainsbury, of health think tank Nuffield Trust, said Reeves’s decision to use hospital infrastructure money to meet pay demands raised was “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive of NHS Providers said the cuts would have an impact on care for patients and on NHS productivity.
Cordery said: “If we want to improve patient care and boost productivity, we need significantly more capital investment in the NHS alongside wider reforms including a shift to providing more care closer to home.
Luke Sibieta, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said shifting money from capital budgets to day-to-day spend “can often be attractive in the short run, but can make it harder to deliver long-run plans to rebuild”.
The cash was moved despite repeated pledges by Labour during the general election campaign to prioritise infrastructure. However, since then, severe budget constraints have grown tighter because of expensive pay deals designed to avoid continued public-sector strikes.
They said: “School building programmes have not been cut as a result of the teacher pay deal, and our investment ambition for the school estate remains unchanged.
“Despite the challenging economic context, in July we confirmed a 5.5 per cent pay award for teachers and provided almost £1.1bn in additional funding for schools.”
“We have already delivered pay rises for over 1.5 million NHS staff and ended devastating strike action by resident doctors that carried immense costs to patients, staff, and the taxpayer.”
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( £1bn cuts to hospitals and schools to fund pay rises for doctors and teachers )
Also on site :