I don't understand what your point is - that you think it's accepatable or terrible. Here's a graph from the report you linked...A curiously short period shown in the Kingsfund graphic. Which ignores the huge extra costs of trying to cope with our increasingly old, and costly, population. The jump in spending in 2020 and 2021 was on Covid-19-specific activities outside of what the NHS usually does – including the UK’s very expensive Test and Trace programme.
A fuller graph is linked here:
The past, present and future of government spending on the NHS
With the Chancellor making further updates to government spending plans and the health service facing crisis on several fronts, there is uncertainty over what the future will hold for health care finances amid such instability. How much is this government really spending on the NHS per person...www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk
"But while the NHS needs more each year merely to stand still in the face of rising prices, it also needs more simply to cope with changes in the population. Changes in the size of the English population – which has grown by 10.6 million since 1979 – mean that spending per person has not grown as fast as the total spend.
And it’s not only the population head count that has changed. So too has its demographic structure. In particular, the number of older people has grown, both in absolute terms and also as a proportion of the total population.
This has been most noticeable in the growing numbers of people aged 85 and over, who now make up around twice the proportion of the population compared to just 30 years ago. Over the same period, the proportion of the population aged 20 to 24 has shrunk by more than a fifth.
These changes make a significant difference to the demands put on the health care system, as someone in their mid-to-late eighties on average consumes around 10 times as much hospital-based care as someone in their early twenties.
Using estimates of the costs of hospital-based care for different age groups, our analysis shows that, on average, health care spending per person in England grew by around 2.6% a year in real terms between 1979/80 and 2020/21, after these changes in the demographic structure are taken into account. This excludes spending in 2020/21 ringfenced for Covid-19.
That 2.6% represents the available resources for the NHS over and above that which would be needed to keep up with inflation, population growth and the increasing health needs of an ageing demographic. It therefore gives an indication of what has been available to the NHS to do more than stand still: to improve the quality of care; adopt new treatments, drugs and technologies; reduce risk; and meet rising patient and public expectations.
As can be seen from the chart, this average increase has not been spread evenly. The last 40 years can be characterised as a period of increases averaging 2.1% in the 17 years prior to 1997, followed by 13 years of much higher growth, averaging 5.7% a year between 1997/98 and 2009/10.
But in the decade leading up to the pandemic, real-terms spending increases per head averaged just 0.4% a year and included four years in which spending per head actually fell. This has been a period of stagnation in terms of the resources available to the NHS to fund improvements in health care quality, or to expand its horizons of what it is possible to do for patients."
The past, present and future of government spending on the NHS
With the Chancellor making further updates to government spending plans and the health service facing crisis on several fronts, there is uncertainty over what the future will hold for health care finances amid such instability. How much is this government really spending on the NHS per person...
Regardless of which line you're looking at, that's an utterly horrendous runaway rate of spending growth. Perhaps its rate of increase has reduced slightly since 2010 but it's still raging upwards, at a record high level every year. If it carries on like this, the NHS will be spending more than the country's entire government revenue. It's definitely not under-funded as the Labour liars continually claim.
I suspect that the tiny dip at the end has been well and truly wiped out by the covid and ongoing chaos since.
