It would get a lot more value from that funding if the Tories (and to be fair, also the last Labour gov a decade and a half ago, though not as much) hadn't been

It would get a lot more value from that funding if the Tories (and to be fair, also the last Labour gov a decade and a half ago, though not as much) hadn't been pushing so much of it towards embedding privatisation through the NHS such that profits are pointlessly being taken out at all stages. (Well, obviously not pointless for the shareholders, who happen to often coincidentally be tory party donors.) A hospital having a 20% bigger budget for their janitorial staff isn't in a better position if it's also been required to move from hiring full time cleaners in-house to contracting an approved cleaning company that has 30% profit margin baked in. An NHS patient isn't helped knowing that 50% more funding goes into paying consultants for the problem they have, if gradually more and more of those consultants are moving to private health companies and having to be rented back to the NHS at a markup that pays both the doctor and the company's shareholders. Etc etc. Sure, the population demographics are related, but even if we had the exact same population as 20 years ago we'd be in a much worse situation; plus it's the government's job to pay attention to things like demo changes in their population, and to listen to the warnings that have been coming from the medical community for many years, and should have been proactively funding better social care (instead of completely abandoning it to local councils while also lowering their funding) AND making the NHS even better (rather than gradually turning it into an umbrella for private companies who eat up any budget increases).