Farage and Bruce clash over health spending figures—but who was in the right ballpark?
On BBC Question Time last night, the host Fiona Bruce and Reform UK honorary president Nigel Farage provided conflicting percentages for the amount spent by the government on healthcare.
Mr Farage said: “We’re now spending over 10% of our national cake on the NHS every year… Even regardless of population, we’ve increased in percentage terms enormously under this government.”
But he was then challenged by Ms Bruce, who said “actually about 18% of total spending is on health”. Mr Farage responded that it was “between 10 and 11”.
The figures seem contradictory, and we’ve since had viewers contact Full Fact asking us to clarify which speaker was correct.
But from our analysis, it appears that neither was wrong, and they were simply quoting different measures of healthcare spending.
We’ve asked Reform UK what figures Mr Farage was referring to, and haven’t had a response. But according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), UK healthcare expenditure in 2022 (the most up to date annual data) was around £283 billion, of which £230 billion was government healthcare spending, and the rest made up of non-government spending, such as voluntary health insurance.
If all healthcare spending (which includes non-government healthcare expenditure) is viewed as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), then it was 11.3% of GDP in 2022, according to the ONS.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which also calculates healthcare spending as a share of GDP, provisionally says that in 2022 the UK spent 9.3% of GDP on government healthcare.
Mr Farage also compared how much the government is spending on health now with previous years. “Go back six, seven years, we were spending about 7% of our national cake on the NHS every year,” he said.
This would broadly align with the OECD statistics which record it as 7.9% in 2015 and 7.8% in 2016. (The term ‘national cake’ is sometimes used as slang for GDP.)
When Ms Bruce appeared to correct Mr Farage’s figure during the show, she said total “government spending” on health was actually “about 18%”.
The BBC has told Full Fact Ms Bruce was referring to a different measure—healthcare spending as a proportion of total managed expenditure (TME), which is the total amount of money that the government spends each year.
In 2022/23, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, health spending equated to 18.3% of TME—which was the source Ms Bruce quoted from.
(It’s worth noting that when we wrote about current health spending earlier this year and calculated a 2023/24 figure, using Treasury estimates, it was a bit lower.)
So, while potentially confusing for people watching the programme, it appears neither Mr Farage or Ms Bruce was necessarily wrong, if talking about 2022 spending—although they could have been more clear about which data they were referring to.
Image courtesy of BBC