Jeremy Hunt has promised to get serious about NHS health tourism before. Is he serious this time?

This morning, we wake up to the news that the government is now serious about collecting money from health tourists – those who come to the UK to use the NHS without being entitled to it. We have, alas, heard this before.

For weeks now, we have been reading about a crisis in A&E — a symptom, we’re told, of a funding crisis in the National Health Service more generally. Since I started working for the NHS almost 45 years ago, this has been a familiar theme: the system is creaking, but a bit more tax money should suffice. To many of us who have seen the system close at hand, another question presents itself: what if the NHS were to cut down on waste? And perhaps recover costs from the health tourists who turn up for treatment to which they are not entitled?

I first made the case for doing so four years ago, in the pages of this magazine, when I was the senior surgeon of a rare cancers unit at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.