The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Karen Dunnell, 7 October 2008:
As National Statistician I have been asked to reply to your question on which figures are collated by the Office for National Statistics on the net cost of the National Health Service in (a) the UK, (b) England, (c) Wales, (d) Scotland and (e) Northern Ireland in each of the last 11 years. (224075)
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) collates and publishes data on the expenditure by Government on health services overall, but does not collate statistics on the NHS alone. Examples of Government expenditure on health services outside the NHS are the expenditure on health by Ministry of Defence, and the education and training of NHS medical staff.
Data on Government expenditure on health are sourced from HM Treasury at a UK level, and are not collated or published by country or region of the UK.
In January 2007 the ONS published an article 'Public Service Productivity: Health Care'. This article contained a table showing general government final consumption expenditure on health from 1995 to 2006. The table is shown below.
£ billion 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 Average annual change 1995-2006 (%) Labour 22.7 23.5 24.5 25.4 26.6 28.9 31.5 34.8 38.3 41.1 44.2 47.3 6.9 Goods and services 15.4 17.2 17.1 19.0 22.6 23.2 25.3 26.6 29.7 33.9 36.6 40.5 9.2 Capital consumption 1.3 1.4 1.4 1.4 1.5 1.7 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.9 3.5 Total 39.4 42.0 43.0 45.9. 50.8 53.7 58.4 63.1 69.8 76.7 82.6 89.7 7.8 Note: 1. These figures differ from those used in Blue Book 2007 (ONS 2007d), as they incorporate data revisions to the historical series. Also, by convention, Blue Book 2007 includes expenditure on capital items in GP surgeries within intermediate consumption. The estimates in this table include such expenditure in capital consumption.