‘No party is telling the truth about crisis facing NHS’

Britain’s main political parties are guilty of hiding from the electorate the true scale of the financial crisis facing the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, former head of the health service, has warned.

Nicholson’s remarks threaten to explode the various “guarantees” to protect the NHS with higher spending in the future. He said all the parties should be doing more to tell voters about the more imminent financial black hole in the NHS finances that is likely to become clear in the autumn.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both committed their parties to spending an extra £8 billion a year more by 2020 in line with a report by Sir David's successor, Simon Stevens, who has said the service will also need to make efficiency savings of £22 billion.

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Oddly, given the importance Labour attaches to the NHS as an election issue, Ed Miliband’s party has not signed up to the extra £8bn (promising only an extra £2.5bn) and Nicholson put pressure on Miliband to come into line.

However, the extra £8bn won’t cure the more immediate deficit problem. In a Today programme interview this morning, Nicholson said the extra finances needed to be “front-loaded” to deal with the “financial hole” that is going to become apparent this autumn.

Asked by Today's John Humphrys whether party leaders were concealing the truth from voters, Sir David said: “I have not heard in most of the conversations politicians are having at the moment about what they're going to do about that financial hole.

“They want to talk about extra services and extra investment when actually there is a problem there to face.”

He said the NHS would have to take "emergency action" such as freezing staff vacancies. He also cast doubt on whether any of the parties can achieve the £22bn in efficiency savings expected in the Stevens plan.

“It is a theoretical thing,” he said. “There is no health service in the world that has delivered [efficiency savings] on this scale.”

There may be attempts to discredit Sir David - he resigned after the Mid-Staffs NHS care scandal – but, in their current mood, the voters are likely to believe him rather than the politicians.