Government spent much more than £18bn on the Covid health response
A claim that the NHS only received a fraction of the Covid-19 money it was allocated was shared widely on social media last month.
One post on Twitter (now known as X) said: “£86b was added to the NHS budget in 2020/21 to “fight” Covid. The NHS only saw £18b of it.”
A screenshot of the post was later shared on Facebook as well.
The £86 billion figure in this claim is not quite right, and the whole claim is missing some important context, because a large amount of Covid funding for the health sector went to NHS Test and Trace, vaccine deployment and other health programmes—even if it did not technically go to the NHS itself.
Full Fact has approached the X user to ask what figures they are referring to, but we have not received a response at the time of writing.
False or misleading health claims online have the potential to harm the democratic process as well as confidence in health service staff and leaders. Online claims can spread fast and far, and are difficult to contain and correct.
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Where these numbers come from
The National Audit Office estimates that the lifetime cost to the government of Covid measures for health and social care as of June 2022 was £89 billion. This is very close to the figure quoted in the tweet, although it covers two years, not just 2020/21.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) annual accounts say it received £63 billion in additional funding for Covid measures in 2020/21.
And while the NHS in England was allocated an extra £18 billion from this for its frontline response to the pandemic in 2020/21, much of the rest of the extra health department funding that year was allocated to other parts of the Covid health response, including £23.1 billion on the Test and Trace programme, £14.8 billion on PPE procurement and supply, £4.2 billion for vaccine deployment and other treatments.
So while it is true that the NHS in England was technically allocated an additional £18 billion for the frontline response to Covid during 2020/21, much of the other funding supplied to the DHSC was spent on measures that were intended to support or take pressure off the health service.
Image courtesy of John Cameron.
