Burnham: 'Ruthless spending cuts will fund free social care'

A £670 million-a-year plan to provide free social care will be paid for by cutting spending on research and development and public health promotions, as well as efficiencies in the NHS, Health Secretary Andy Burnham said today.

But the Department of Health said that the NHS's health research programme - including work on healthcare priorities like cancer and dementia - would be "ring-fenced" to be protected from any cuts.

Research and development savings will come from the department's separate R&D budget, which concentrates on administrative issues, said a spokesman.

The Social Care Bill, being published today, is a key plank of the Government's agenda set out by Gordon Brown in last week's Queen's Speech, which the Prime Minister hopes to rush on to the statute books in the maximum six months left before a general election.

It will guarantee free personal care at home for up to 280,000 elderly and disabled people with the highest needs, while another 130,000 will receive other help, including adaptations to their properties to allow them to remain at home for longer.

Mr Burnham told The Times he planned to pay for the measures by diverting £60 million from his department's R&D budget and £50 million from public health promotions.

Cutting spending on management consultants would provide £60 million, while further funds would come from a productivity drive intended to secure £20 billion in efficiency savings across the NHS over the next four years.

But a Department of Health spokesman said: "We can categorically state that cancer and dementia funding will not be affected.

"We are now providing more funding than ever for health research. This £1 billion budget is ring-fenced for research.

"We are committed to fighting cancer and have recently announced our plans for patients to be given a legal right to see a cancer specialist within two weeks."

Mr Burnham told The Times he would be "ruthless" in finding funding for the home care plan.

"It's always a question of priorities," he said. "I'm not cutting into vital projects. I'm moving stuff out of lower-priority, backroom spend towards direct public benefit.

"All I want to say is we are being tough about that. I'm interested in really squeezing so that we get as much benefit directly to the public as quickly as we can.

"I've got to be ruthless about that and I will be ruthless about that."

Labour peer Lord Lipsey of Tooting Bec, a former member of the Royal Commission on long term care, repeated his criticism of the plans and questioned whether the money could be found through efficiency savings.

He told GMTV: "I have not seen the bill yet, but if it does what it is reported to be doing, the first thing is that it is extremely expensive. We really have a very tight position fiscally nationally now, this is an extra £670 million in year one - in Scotland, where they have done this and it has proved a disaster, that sum rose by three quarters in just four years.

"So tax payers are going to have to pay for this for years and years and years."

He added: "We as tax payers are prepared to pay for good policies to help the elderly, but this isn't in my view a very well crafted policy because it gives help to people just as long as they stay in their own home.

"If they have to go into a home because they have got really advanced dementia or are doubly incontinent, all those horrible things that happen at the end of life, they won't get a penny of extra help from the state as a result of this bill."

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "Andy Burnham's sums simply don't add up. The amount of money they are cutting from the NHS budget doesn't even begin to cover what they claim the cost of the policy will be, which most experts agree is already a gross under-estimate.

"The cuts to the medical research budget will also do real damage to our long-term work on preventing killer diseases.

"The NHS constitution, which was published just two weeks ago, says that medical research is at 'the core' of the NHS - and yet Burnham's first response is to cut it.

"Labour are also proposing to axe key public campaigns on areas like tackling MRSA, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.

"Many people will wonder if this is the best use of NHS resources."