Theresa May has reiterated her much-questioned belief that a new funding deal for the NHS can be financed in part using money saved as a result of Brexit, but said taxpayers should also expect to contribute more.

NHS Brexit dividend: questions posed by Theresa May's pledge Read more

In a much-trailed speech about a new long-term funding deal for the health service, the prime minister confirmed a planned real-terms annual rise of 3.4% until 2023-24, giving NHS England £20.5bn more a year by the end of the period.

In a wide-ranging address at the Royal Free hospital in north London, she also promised to contribute £1.25bn more a year to NHS pensions costs, and said careers in the health service should be made more flexible and family-friendly.

But she remained vague on where the new money – £394m more a week in real terms by the end of the settlement – would come from, beyond mentioning taxes and repeating her confidence in a “Brexit dividend”.

In the run-up to the speech May faced criticism over the lack of clarity, plus the reliance on a Brexit boost – something both the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank have said will not materialise.

Answering questions afterwards, May said bigger tax revenues would be part of the answer. “As a country taxpayers will need to contribute a bit more,” she said. “But we will do that in a fair and balanced way. And we want to listen to people about how we do that, and the chancellor will bring forward the full set of proposals before the spending review.”

Asked about the scepticism over the Brexit dividend claim – official forecasts say departing the EU will cost the public purse about £15bn a year, while much of the EU contribution has already been allocated for the next few years – May stood by the idea.

“It’s very simple: we’re not going to be sending the vast amount of money every year to the EU that we spend at the moment as a member of the European Union,” she said. “That money will be coming back, and we will be spending it on our priorities. And NHS is our No 1 priority.



“Of course, as we’ve agreed in the financial settlement last December, there will be those payments that we’ll be making over a period of time as part of our withdrawal from the EU, but there will still be more money coming back from the EU.”

May used her speech to call the NHS the “crowning achievement” of the Labour government 70 years ago, but also argued that the service “does not belong to a single political party”.

Amid rising pressures on its services and lower-than-average funding increases, May said the rise in spending would form part of a longer, 10-year plan for the NHS.

“We cannot continue to put a sticking plaster on the NHS budget each year. So we will do more than simply give the NHS a one-off injection of cash,” she said.

Referring to last week’s decision to lift the visa cap on overseas NHS staff coming to the UK, May said it was not right in the long term “to rely so heavily on highly qualified health professionals from parts of the world where they can be desperately needed”.

She said: “To do that we need to make careers in the NHS more attractive. We need to recognise that today working practices in the NHS have not caught up with modern lifestyles.

“Think of the nurse working beyond his shift for the fifth day in a row who can’t pick up his children from school. Think of the junior doctor with limited choice about where and when she works who has to alter her plans because rotas are changed at the last minute without her having any say.”