Primary care could face a wave of reform in its funding systems as the government seeks to make budgets stretch further, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer has revealed.

Jeremy Hunt was pressed by MPs about his intentions for the NHS when he gave his Parliamentary statement yesterday, reversing many of the policies proposed by his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng a few weeks earlier. One Conservative MP asked him: “Will he be able to give reassurance to people working in the NHS and patients across the country that he will maintain the levels of funding necessary to cope with those winter pressures and with the future challenges that the health and social care system will face?”

Hunt replied: “I am, I think, one of only two Chancellors to have been Health Secretary, so I am very aware of the pressures in the NHS. I am not making any commitments, but when it comes to the NHS the whole country wants to make sure that it can cope not just with winter crises but with the pressures we have had since COVID. We will look at that very carefully, but I would also like to see reform in the way NHS funding is spent, because I think we can do better with the large sums that we spend already.”

NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor questioned where savings could be found.

He said: “Health leaders are incredibly concerned about how they will be able to continue running many important patient services while at the same time plugging gaps in funding which could stretch to £20 billion or more over the course of the next three years, although of course they will continue to do all they can to manage services as efficiently and effectively as possible while at the same time trying to meet huge rising demand from patients. However, if, as the new Chancellor has requested, government departments will be expected to ‘redouble’ their efforts to find public expenditure savings, and after over a decade of austerity that has left NHS organisations already having to run near skeletal services, it is very hard to see where any further cuts can be made.

“Latest calculations from the Institute for Government show that most services do not have enough funding to return to pre-pandemic levels and this includes current hospital spend which will not drive down pandemic accrued backlogs as well as insufficient investment in primary care to meet demand. This is coupled with the government’s own recent unfunded NHS staff pay rise which will also mean additional cuts to health service budgets, so the Chancellor really will need to level with the public about the impact of further cuts on the NHS.”