How much did schools, transport and the NHS get? | UK News

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced the government’s Spending Review, which outlines the day-to-day budgets for departments over the next three years.

The review will see NHS funding increase by 3% a year as well as more money for defence and housing.

But other departments will see their budget cuts – including 1.7% at the Home Office, 2.7% at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and 6.9% at the Foreign Office.

Here correspondents analyse how some key services have fared and what the decisions may mean for you.

The education sector will see one of the largest funding boosts. There is money for England’s schools – especially crumbling ones – as well as for training and upskilling. Those key takeaways are nestled among rehashed pledges like expanding free school meals and introducing free breakfast clubs.

The core schools budget will rise by £2bn in real terms by 2029, the Department for Education says, but much of it will go on those previous commitments. Falling pupil numbers means the department can make some savings, but that money still has to pay for an awful lot.

The government is staring down the barrel of ever-growing demand for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support. The Spending Review does not seem to address deficits racked up by councils supporting those children, but it does appear to have set aside around £700m to reform the system.

Leaky schools on the government’s rebuilding programme – many still waiting for builders – will also be wondering if a £2.4bn annual cash injection will suffice.

The 3% annual real-terms increase in NHS spending announced by the chancellor will look generous to departments with low or no increases. That number covers day-to-day spending by the NHS, for example staff pay and the costs of medicines and patients care.

The overall annual increase for the Department of Health is 2.8% – one of the highest departmental increases in the Spending Review – and includes other areas like medicines regulation and pandemic preparedness, as well as the NHS.

It is worth pointing out that the health service needs real-term spending growth every year to cope with an increasing and ageing population alongside rising bills for medicines and new treatments. The long-term trend for annual UK health spending in recent decades has been around 3.5%.

Aside from day-to-day funding there is also capital spending, which covers investment in buildings and equipment. In real-terms there will be no increase each year. The big question is whether that will be enough to enable staff to deliver more operations and procedures.

One of Labour’s pledges is to ensure more than 90% of patients in England start treatment within 18 weeks of referral. Currently it is less than 60%. Hitting that target is a big ask with all the other claims on spending.

“We are happy bunnies” is how someone from the Department for Transport (DfT) reacted to the Spending Review. That is despite the department seeing its annual day-to-day budget decrease by 5% – the largest cut in the review.

That hit is mostly down to a big drop in the subsidies the government has been paying to train companies since the Covid-19 pandemic. Capital expenditure – meaning money for long-term infrastructure investment – on transport is actually going up by 3.9%, among the highest.

Long-term investment in transport infrastructure is clearly central to Labour’s plan for “national renewal”, so a good chunk of the chancellor’s speech was devoted to various upgrades. Some we already knew about, some we didn’t.

They include a new Liverpool to Manchester rail line, a freeze on the £3 cap on bus fares in England until March 2027 and more than £15.6bn on new trams, trains and buses outside of London.

The Conservatives say a lot of this is just rehashing of old announcements with little detail attached. The government says it will lay some meat on the bones of these plans next week in its so-called “infrastructure week”.

Apart from bus fares, which is a continuation of an existing policy, Reeves’ plans are in keeping with the general theme of this Spending Review: ambitious but ultimately not materialising for quite some time – until the 2030s at the earliest.

You could almost hear the sigh of relief from social landlords when £39bn was announced for social and affordable housing. Many had warned that without significant funding and certainty, the government would never reach its target of building 1.5 million homes over this parliament.

But they’ve called Wednesday’s announcement a “game changer”. Guaranteeing how much social landlords will receive in rents over the next 10 years means that housing associations can plan how much they have to invest in building.

Housing charity Shelter called the investment a “watershed moment”. The charity’s head of policy, Charlie Trew, said the amount was 70% more than the previous government invested but it was still not enough to end homelessness for good. The charity called for a “clear target” for exactly how many social rent homes are planned.

A 2.3% real terms yearly funding increase for policing in England and Wales is slightly better than senior officers had feared, but forces are already warning of “some ruthless prioritisation”, arguing that most of the money will be “swallowed up” by police pay rises.

The chancellor stressed that an increase of “more than £2bn” will mean government pledges on cutting crime and increasing police numbers can be kept.

On immigration, there is more money for the Border Security Command, rising to £280m extra a year, with promises of new kit including an army of drones to improve surveillance. Reeves also promised that the use of hotels for asylum seekers would end by 2029.

But with overall Home Office spending being cut by 1.7% a year, there are knotted eyebrows at how this is all going to add up and be achieved while managing a sizeable squeeze to the department’s budget.

Just recently we were told that offenders recalled to prison would be let out earlier due to overcrowding. We know the government is planning on building three more prisons to deal with the capacity crisis.

The chancellor said £7bn would be spent on that building project – that’s more than we were told earlier this month, when the figure stood at £4.7bn.

The increase in funding – an extra 1.8% each year is the second highest rise in the review – indicates the severity and urgency of the problem. But building more prisons will take years.

Also announced was £700m to reform the probation service – that cash will fund further recruitment on top of the 1,300 officers the government had already said it will employ this year.

Several probation officers welcomed the investment but raised concerns about their “increasing workload” and when the new hires will be functional.

The chancellor has made full use of the extra £113bn in capital spending available as a result of changing her own borrowing rules. There are some big ticket items on the list, most of which were announced before Wednesday, but these large projects will take many years before people will notice the difference.

An extra £14.2bn for the new Sizewell C nuclear plant will be spent over at least a decade. The same is true of an extra £39bn for affordable and social housing. New announcements included £10bn for making homes more energy efficient and a new carbon capture project in Scotland. Connecting people and places is also growth-enhancing, but again the £16bn on transport links outside of London will not see quick returns.

Business groups are largely supportive of these ambitious plans and the chancellor will hope it persuades firms to spend some of their own money to boost business investment, which has been chronically low.

They may want to see the detail of the upcoming infrastructure and industrial strategies. There is jam in here but it will take time to spread and the results will take longer than tomorrow.

The chancellor announced that funding for science – or research and development (R&D) – would increase to just over £22.6 billion per year by 2029/30. That funding pays for scientific research across government departments such as health, defence and energy.

That overall figure also includes the budget for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) itself, which has been given £16bn per year and will use it to fund research for everything from drug development to materials science to AI – £2bn has been earmarked for the latter from 2026/27 to 2029/30.

While the chancellor called this a “record”, it is broadly in line with projected inflation. But the UK’s Campaign for Science and Engineering said it was welcome confirmation that the R&D budget was being “protected in tough fiscal circumstances”.

Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said the UK continued to lag behind competitors in the G7 on research and innovation investment.

“We should be looking to lead,” he added in a statement. “We must also go further to attract and retain global talent.

“The UK’s sky-high upfront visa costs are an unnecessary deterrent at a time when our competitors are rolling out the welcome mat for the brightest minds.”