BMA says government must plug funding gap in healthcare spending between UK and other European countries

Ministers are guilty of “callous disregard” of the NHS and have put its funding into “deep freeze”, doctors’ leaders claim in a sharply worded attack on the Conservatives’ stewardship of the health service. The government must plug “the enormous funding gap” in healthcare spending between Britain and other major European countries, the British Medical Association says.

Dr Chand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA’s GPs committee, is to tell a conference of family doctors on Thursday that the NHS “has been paralysed by the vote for the UK to leave the European Union”.

“Far from the pledged investment of an extra £350m per week, audaciously plastered on double decker buses, the reality is we’ve been cheated with the opposite: a deep-freeze in NHS spend, continued savage austerity cuts, and with politicians turning a blind eye to the spiralling pressures affecting the entire health and social care system, in which even the 18-week target, laid down in the NHS constitution, is being allowed to be breached,” Nagpaul will say.

In addition, GP services are under such pressure and beset by such serious understaffing that they are “on the brink of collapse”.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesman, said: “Instead of £350m a week for the NHS, under the Conservatives we’ve seen the health service being gradually run into the ground. The NHS cannot take five years of a Conservative landslide that would give Theresa May free rein to cut services further at your local hospital.”

Meanwhile, the Health Foundation thinktank has warned the prime minister that the operation and future of the NHS and the social care system are at risk because of serious and deepening staff shortages.

Urgent action is needed, the thinktank says, because 900 people a day are quitting as social care workers, too few new recruits are joining the sector, and the workforce is struggling, with 80,000 vacancies.