Better and better?

Recently Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, announced that adults all over 40 were to have the possibility of a free NHS health test - "M.O.T." He was echoing the words of Bottler Brown in January.

Most of us would welcome this, on the basis that prevention is better than cure, and often less invasive and traumatic.

The trouble is that we have heard all this before. The Daily Telegraph "Three Line Whip" blog yesterday recalled that we have heard it all before.

In fact we heard it first from Alan Milburn in 2000, for all pensioners, and from John Reid in 2004. Charles Kennedy announced it as LiDem policy in 2005, only for Patricia Hewitt to announce it at the 2005 Labour Party Conference and again in a 2006 White Paper.

It would be easy to regard this quite cynically as a means of giving a struggling government some "momentum", and an attempt to regain voter favour.

But let us give them all the benefit of the doubt, for once, and assume that they all wanted to achieve the situation. If so, after so much time, it is to be hoped that they have considered fully all the problems and issues, and that unusually they will produce a policy that works well from the outset and does not have to be subsequently revised because of unforeseen problems.