§ Mr. Bestasked the Secretary of State for Wales whether he has reached decisions about the allocation of resources for hospital and community health services in Wales in 1985–86.
§ Mr. Nicholas EdwardsYes. I will provide a cash increase over provision in 1984–85 of 6.3 per cent. This cash increase includes an allowance of 4 per cent. for price movements and 3 per cent. for pay. The balance over and above these allowances represents growth of 3.1 per cent. which is £19.1 million in cash terms. This is on top of the recurring revenue growth provided for health authorities in Wales of 12.8 per cent. comparing 1979–80 with the resources available in the current year.
Of the £19.1 million growth moneys, £13.044 million will be devoted to centrally funded developments. These include some £9 million for the commissioning of major hospital developments at Bridgend, Morriston and Wrexham; over £2 million for further development in regional services, including the new renal dialysis facilities in Swansea, Carmarthen and Bangor and the continuing expansion of the bone marrow transplantation programme; nearly £800,000 for continued consultant expansion in shortage specialties, and £1.5 million to develop for the services for mentally ill and mentally handicapped people and to combat the misuse of drugs.
The balance of £6.057 million (or 1 per cent.) will be made available to health authorities for discretionary use, on the basis of a minimum of 0.75 per cent. discretionary growth for all authorities with the balance of 0.25 per cent. allocated to those authorities indicated by the revenue allocation formula to be relatively underfunded. There is to be a major review of the formula in the current year to form the basis for allocations in 1986–87 and, against this background, I regard the proposed level of provision for revenue equalisation as appropriate towards my programme to remove the major inequalities in the relative funding of authorities.
The revenue resources available for individual authorities in 1985–86 will be as shown in the table. These allocations do not take into account further sums which will be made available following decisions on centrally funded developments for the coming year. These will be announced shortly.
89W
Revenue Allocations 1985–86 £ million Clwyd 75,992 East Dyfed 47,780 Pembrokeshire 16,573 Gwent 94,134 Gwynedd 46,451 Mid Glamorgan 106,287 Powys 21,622 South Glamorgan 126,969 West Glamorgan 76,085 I am glad that we have been able to make available these additional resources for the NHS in Wales. This demonstrates yet again this Government's commitment to a developing NHS which meets the needs of the people of Wales.