Day-to-day departmental spending is set to grow at an average of 2% per year in real terms from 2023-24 to 2029-30, supporting public services and aiming to deliver 40,000 extra elective appointments weekly while tackling NHS waiting lists. The capital investment for 2025-26 will include £1.5 billion to facilitate over 30,000 NHS procedures, add more than 1.25 million diagnostic tests and install new beds across the NHS estate. An additional £1 billion is earmarked to address the backlog of critical NHS maintenance, repairs and upgrades.

During her 75-minute Budget presentation, Reeves committed to reducing waiting lists and highlighted that her tax and welfare decisions enabled increased spending on the NHS. She stated this represents the largest real-time growth in day-to-day NHS spending outside of Covid since 2021.

‘To increase capacity for tens of thousands more procedures next year, we will provide a further £1.5 billion for new beds in hospitals across our country, new capacity for over a million additional diagnostic tests, new surgical hubs and diagnostic centres – so that people waiting for treatment can get it as quickly as possible,’ she said.

In addition, over £2 billion will also be invested in NHS technology and digital initiatives to improve service efficiency and productivity, enabling the use of electronic patient records and enhancing access through the NHS App.

Reeves said: ‘Because of this record injection of funding, the additional beds we have secured and the reforms we are implementing in our NHS, we can now begin to bring waiting lists down more quickly and work towards our target for waiting times to be no longer than 18 weeks.’

She cited the ‘unforgivable’ deficiencies of the NHS under the previous Conservative government, noting: ‘A hundred thousand infants waited over six hours in A&E last year, and 350,000 people are waiting a year for mental health support.’

Regarding the ten-year plan for the NHS, Reeves stated: ‘Today we are announcing a down payment on that plan to enable the NHS to deliver 2% productivity growth next year. These reforms are vital, but the previous decade has been the most austere for the NHS since it was founded.’

Moving towards digital

In the spring, the government also promised to unveil a 10-year plan to modernise the NHS, focusing on a shift from hospital to community care, transitioning from analogue to digital systems, and moving from a focus on sickness to prevention.

Jon Pickering, CEO of Mizaic, a healthtech firm that has collaborated with over 25 NHS Trusts to digitise patient records, expressed the importance of sustained investment for the NHS. He stated: ‘We welcome the government’s commitment to invest in our NHS. Transformative funding is a promising step, and we’re watching closely to see how this will translate into practical support for digital initiatives within Trusts. However, while these commitments are encouraging, we must remain cautiously optimistic – our sector has seen similar promises before, but a truly digital NHS requires sustained targeted investment and unwavering focus.

‘The digital landscape across the NHS is still fragmented, and achieving a cohesive, paperless system means prioritising end-to-end digitisation of patient histories and enabling Trusts to fully leverage centralised, accessible patient data. To make a real impact, funding needs to prioritise initiatives that enhance clinical workflows, improve patient care and reduce waiting times. We’re ready to partner with NHS Trusts to ensure these funds create meaningful change, building a future where data-enabled healthcare benefits both clinicians and patients across the UK.’