Get your act together!

We have had a boost in health spending. No-one doubts this. If we had continued to increase spending at the pre-1999 rate until 2004 we would have spent £34.3 billion less on the NHS than we actually have. This then is the measure of the boost in spending.

The five year increase was calculated by the Taxpayers Alliance in a recent investigation. They used data from the World Health Organisation and statistical techniques pioneered in the British Medical Journal. They considered the period 1981-2004, the final year being the last year for which data were available. They calculated a measure known as "mortality amenable to healthcare", to produce the number of deaths which could have plausibly have been averted.

Two startling conclusions emerge.

1) If the UK had achieved the average level of "mortality amenable to healthcare" in the other countries they studied, - Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain, then from 2004 spending there would have been 17,157 fewer deaths in the UK.
This figure is tragic for the families concerned, but it is five times the number of deaths from road accidents and two and half times the number from alcohol.

2) The steady improvements in mortality have been at the same rate since 1981, under Thatcher, Major and Blair. There is thus no doubting the proposition that the boost to spending between 1999 and 20004 has produced little impact on mortality.

It may be that in the fullness of time if the higher spending is maintained, - at the moment there are cut-backs because of government debt, and a much fuller degree of reform of the ancient, monolithic, centralised and bureaucratic structure of the NHS takes place, that we narrow the gap with European results. In the fullness of time they will have progressed further, of course.

At the moment, while New Labour can point to "achievements" - reduced waiting times in some areas at least, there is no discernible difference in mortality rates. The major beneficiaries of the spending seem to have been the extra bureaucrats employed and some members of the medical profession. This was predicted at the outset, and will continue so long as the service is producer- led and London controlled.