Ongoing Covid booster drive to eat into health and social care levy funds

An ongoing booster vaccination programme to deal with recurring coronavirus pressures will eat into funds yielded from the new health and social care levy earmarked for the NHS.

The government could be forced to use some of the money produced from the 1.25 per cent levy on a permanent booster campaign, with the total bill possibly rising to £5bn.

The news was first reported by The Sunday Times.

The emergence of the more transmissible Omicron variant of coronavirus has thrown a spanner into the Treasury’s calculations on how much future measures to deal with the virus will cost.

Concern over the potential severity of the new strain has prompted Treasury officials to draw up plans for every adult to get a jab every three to six months.

Receipts from the new health and social care levy had been intended to drive down hospital waiting lists and reform England’s creaking social care system.

However, a proportion of this money may go toward funding a permanent response to the Covid-19 crisis, including vaccinations, NHS test and trace and the new health protection agency.

A Treasury source told The Sunday Times: “If the assumptions have all changed, which it looks like they have, you quite quickly get to £4bn or £5bn per year – that’s massive – and that is just on vaccinations and boosters.”

Chancellor Rishi Sunak launched plans to introduce the new health and social care levy, which will start off life as a 1.25 percentage point hike on national insurance and eventually be broken out into a standalone tax, in September this year.