Boris Johnson news live: NHS to receive £6bn in Budget

Some of the £6bn NHS investment will start “making a difference pretty quickly”, with more than £2bn going to community diagnostic centres for tests and scans to tackle waiting lists, health secretary Sajid Javid has said.

Mr Javid insisted on Monday that funding would be made available for the issue of staff shortages, when asked about NHS Confederation figures showing the health service was short of 80,000 workers.

“This £6bn is about sort of capital investments, so… physical things like beds, IT equipment, scanners and things,” he said.

“But the staff investment is actually the announcement… I made just a few weeks ago, and that is the investment of an additional £12bn a year into the NHS and social care, and a large chunk of that is the staff and the day-to-day running costs of the NHS and that includes of course, training costs.

“You’re right to point out that we need more people, it is a big challenge. In the last year, I’m pleased that we’ve seen I think 3,000 more doctors, 9,000 more nurses, but we do need a lot more, we need them for a long-term.”

Staff shortages should be tackled as part of investment into the NHS as funding for equipment will not solve all of the health service’s problems, the chief executive of The King’s Fund has said.

Richard Murray told BBC Radio 4’s Today show that Rishi Sunak’s Budget looked like it would target some of the “big issues” now facing the NHS but more needed to be done.

“We have very few MRI or CT scanners in the United Kingdom compared to other countries,” Mr Murray said.

“There are many gains we have made through Covid about the use of technology, so this is certainly welcome, but the real challenge is as we build these new facilities will we have any staff to put in them, to actually work them?

“This is only three parts of the overall capital spending for the NHS and we still don’t know what’s happened to the rest.”

He added: “There are already very deep shortages across the NHS and that includes in some of the key areas of diagnostics, so great to have the kit and it does need to be updated, but there are shortages even as we speak, so expanding NHS capacity, you’ve got to go hand-in-hand with the facilities.

“It’s increasingly odd that as we look towards the future this one great big keystone- how we’re going to handle NHS workforces and health and social care staffing – is still the missing piece.”

A £5.9bn funding package for tackling NHS waiting lists in England will form part of chancellor Rishi Sunak’s autumn Budget, the Treasury has said.

The spending announcement comes after the latest NHS figures showed that the number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment in England had hit 5.6 million – the highest number since records began in 2007.

Our reporter, Adam Forrest, has the full story below: