Chancellor Rishi Sunak has come under fire for drawing a link between money raised through National Insurance Contributions to fund the health and social care levy and expenditure on the NHS.
The levy was announced in September by prime minister Boris Johnson as a direct link to fund the NHS and help deal with the backlog of patients which had further grown after two years of the pandemic.
In announcing he was pushing through with April’s UK wide 1.25% health and social care levy on earned incomes during his Spring Statement address to Parliament this afternoon, Sunak described the levy as a dedicated funding resource for the NHS and social care.
He added it provided funding for the long term as demand grows with “every penny going straight to health and care”.
But Sunak’s claim met the ire of Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who tweeted: “It was remarkable to claim that the levy went directly to the NHS and then cut revenues from it.
“There is no relationship between what is raised by NI/the health and care levy and what is spent on NHS,” he added.
