Thank you for the invitation to discuss the draft budget for 2017-18. I welcome the opportunity to give evidence on the important subject of ensuring that there is fair and appropriate funding for the national health service, an asset that is precious to us all.
Over the next few years, the demand for health and social care, and the circumstances in which such care is delivered, will be radically different. NHS Scotland must work with its partners throughout the public and voluntary sectors to ensure that it continues to provide the high-quality health and care services that the people of Scotland expect and deserve, and to secure the best possible outcomes for people through the care and support that they receive.
As I have highlighted before, the NHS simply cannot stand still—it must continually evolve to deliver the best medicine and best care, while always ensuring that public money is spent as effectively as possible. It is with that in mind that we published yesterday our delivery plan for health and social care. The plan brings together the key programmes of change for ensuring that our health and social care system can meet new challenges, particularly the national clinical strategy, health and social care integration, and public health improvement. The delivery plan sets out high-level actions and we look forward to working closely and intensively with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, employers and staff-side partners in NHS Scotland and a range of others to deliver our aspirations.
At the core of the delivery plan and our overall approach are the twin themes of investment and reform. Those themes are also at the heart of this budget. In addition to providing extra financial resources, we will continue to drive forward our significant programme of reform. The budget sets the framework for our next steps.
We have consistently prioritised investment in the NHS and have increased front-line health spending between 2010-11 and 2017-18 by 9.3 per cent in real terms. In 2017-18, funding for our core NHS budgets will increase by more than £320 million—more than the Barnett consequential for health, which was £304 million. As a result of an additional £50 million to be directed to national resource allocation committee parity, no board will be further than 1 per cent from parity in 2017-18.
That reflects the priority that this Government places on protecting front-line services and ensuring an equitable distribution of resources. We will continue to demonstrate that central priority moving forward. The NHS revenue budget will be almost £2 billion higher at the end of this session of Parliament than at the outset.
Our commitment to integrating health and social care services is demonstrated in this budget, with additional investment of more than £100 million to be allocated to health and social care partnerships. That will bring the additional NHS investment in health and social care integration up to almost £0.5 billion in 2017-18. It will allow key services to be delivered differently, with greater emphasis on supporting people in their own homes and communities.
As well as progress with integration, the budget sets out further measures to shift the balance of care by increasing, in every year of this session of Parliament, the share of the NHS budget dedicated to mental health and to primary, community and social care. The budget represents an important step to ensuring that, by 2021-22, more than half of front-line NHS spending will be in community health services.
We will invest £72 million in improvements to primary care and general practitioner services, going towards an additional £500 million being invested in this area each year by the end of this session of Parliament. By 2021-22, we will increase spending on primary care to 11 per cent of the front-line NHS budget. In 2017-18, investment in mental health will exceed £1 billion for the first time and mental health investment will exceed £5 billion over this session of Parliament. That will help to underpin our new 10-year mental health strategy, which will be firmly based on the principle of ask once, get help fast.
Our capital investment programme will ensure that the NHS estate is equipped for the challenges ahead. We will invest more than £200 million in the NHS estate and focus on improving primary care facilities, maintaining and updating medical equipment, and replacing key vehicles such as ambulances.
Furthermore, we will prioritise investment in the new Dumfries and Galloway royal infirmary, the new sick children’s hospital and department of clinical neurosciences in Edinburgh, and the Baird family hospital and Aberdeen and north centre for haematology, oncology and radiotherapy in Aberdeen.
The draft budget commits to progression on our £200 million commitment to expand the Golden Jubilee hospital and create five elective care centres in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Inverness and Livingston. That will, for example, allow us to meet the increasing demand for hip and knee replacements and cataract operations. Dedicated elective capacity will help to tackle the knock-on effect that peaks in demand from unscheduled emergency patients can have on planned elective care.
In this global and interconnected world, it is more important than ever that we all consider the impact of our work on wider issues, in particular that of climate change. The NHS, the Scottish Futures Trust and the Scottish Government have been working closely in partnership to develop and procure a Scottish energy efficiency framework, which will permit vital energy efficiency work to be carried out using both capital and revenue funding.
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Recent capital funding has been directed to a number of NHS capital projects, such as the replacement of boilers in the Glasgow royal infirmary and in St John’s hospital in Livingston to improve energy efficiency. In 2017-18, we plan to provide capital investment of £1.8 million to energy efficiency projects in NHS Tayside and NHS Ayrshire and Arran to help lower our carbon emissions.
I conclude with what I said in my opening comments about investment and reform. It is through an approach of continued investment and reform that we will set the basis for delivering the 2020 visions and our longer-term strategy up to 2030 through the delivery plan that we have published. That will ensure a safe, sustainable and person-centred NHS for the people of Scotland. The draft budget for 2017-18 puts in place the framework to enable us to achieve that vision, and I commend it to you.