Spring Statement

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I suspect that now is not the moment for a long debate about the structural funding challenges of the NHS, but the hon. Gentleman is right. We have an ageing population. Technology is driving an ever-wider array of interventions that can and should be made to support people with medical conditions—particularly chronic medical conditions—and we have to look at how to ensure that our NHS remains sustainable in the future. Of course we are looking at that issue. I will not give him a commitment today at the Dispatch Box on how we will do that, but it is absolutely something that we need to do. I very much hope, as he suggests, that this could be done on a serious, cross-party basis, but I fear that his Front Benchers would not be able to resist the temptation to try to play politics with any such serious discussion.

[Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It was excellent to hear the Chancellor talk about educational investment and our human capital. Further to the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), will he explain further whether the Treasury will create standards that will technically value human capital across our Government Departments? That can then drive decision making so that taxpayers’ money is best spent to maximise the human capital that we invest in so much through education and training, rather than being wasted.

[Mr Hammond]

We have asked the ONS to look at this and to consider the metrics that we could use. The objective is to be able to assess clearly where the marginal pound of capital investment should go to achieve the best effect on the economy. Without wanting to pre-empt the outcome of that work, I suspect that in the future, in a very rapidly changing economy, we will find that retraining and upskilling will be a very large part of our investment requirement.