Governments’ wasteful ways

It was inevitable that the government’s re-organisation of NHS management would incur a large upfront cost, but I didn’t expect quite such a large figure. £1.7bn has been siphoned off to pay for the re-structuring of NHS commissioning, seven times more than the planned target for management cuts according to the BBC.

This is a godsend for the opposition, obviously. Insulating the NHS budget from cuts may have been a political masterstroke in 2007, and ‘I will cut the deficit, not the NHS’ may have been a sharp election slogan. But it is idiotic to ringfence the NHS simply to re-arrange the bureaucratic furniture and destabilise the system.

We’ve been here before. The previous government excelled at wasting money in order to be seen as being active. It takes rare feeble-mindedness to repeat the calumny in the current fiscal landscape. If there is a time for re-organising NHS bureaucracy on a stunted