Britain's Conservatives make health service pledge to boost ratings

LONDON, April 11 (Reuters) - Britain's ruling Conservative party sought to boost its poll ratings ahead of next month's knife-edge general election by pledging an extra 8 billion pounds ($12 billion) a year on Saturday to the state-funded health service.

Healthcare is a major campaign issue but surveys have repeatedly shown voters believe the National Health Service (NHS) is in safer hands with the main opposition Labour party, which founded it back in 1948.

Finance minister George Osborne said next week's Conservative manifesto would include a promise to meet a 30 billion-pound per year funding gap, identified by NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens, by the end of the decade.

"We in the Conservative party are in no doubt about our approach: the NHS is something precious, we value it for the security it provides to everyone in our country, and we will always give it the resources it needs," Osborne wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

The NHS costs about 120 billion pounds a year but its budget has been frozen in real terms for the past five years, an exemption from harsh spending cuts suffered by most other public services since the Conservative-led coalition came to power in 2010 vowing to bring down Britain's huge deficit. .

The Conservatives also announced that pensioners aged over 75 will be given the right to same-day access to a physician and that everyone will have access to a doctor at the weekends and in the evenings by 2020.

Labour says Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives plan deep cuts to the NHS and called the latest pledge "fantasy funding".

The announcement came after the first full week of campaigning for the May 7 election, during which no party has established a consistent lead in voter surveys.

The latest poll, by YouGov (LSE: YOU.L - news) and published for the Sun newspaper on Saturday, put Labour ahead on 35 percent, with the Conservatives on 33 percent. Other polls during the week put the Conservatives marginally ahead. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; Editing by Louise Ireland)