Margaret Hodge, the ex-Labour minister who now sits in the Lords, has criticised Wes Streeting on the BBCA minister has criticised her Tory shadow for talking about “joy” in the health sector about the funding it received.Karin Smyth, a health minister, said it was a strange word to use given the state of NHS finances left by the last government.Many in the health sector would have been pleased to hear the announcement of the extra funding going into the NHS [in the budget], only for the joy to be struck down by the realisation of a broken manifesto promise not to raise national insurance contributions.This was only compounded further on the discovery that a raft of frontline care providers – care homes, hospices, care charities, pharmacies, GPS, to name but a few – found themselves not exempt from the NI rises, leaving them with crippling staff bills and the threat of closure and redundancies.He talks about joy. There was no joy when we inherited the mess that they left back in July.The chancellor took into account the impact of changes to national insurance when she allocated an extra £26bn to the Department of Health and Social Care.There are well established processes for agreeing funding allocations across the system, we are going through those processes now with this issue in mind.The British government needs to start now indicating for them what they believe is the tipping point at which they believe a referendum would be called. Continue reading...