Save Our Services

The causes of the NHS financial crisis are legion – but many are due to Government failure:

Ministerial meddling: There have been ten major reorganisations of the NHS since the Government came to power. Each of these reorganisations has been costly: the merger of Primary Care Trusts and the regionalisation of Strategic Health Authorities in 2006 alone are together estimated to have cost £320 million.

Waste: The Government's financial mismanagement has encouraged a culture of profligacy and waste within the NHS. The number of managers in the NHS is increasing almost three times as fast as the number of doctors and nurses. There are now 264,012 administrators in the NHS, compared to 175,646 beds. In the last year alone, 5,000 more administrators than nurses were recruited. By 2004-05 the extra cost of employing NHS administrators was almost £1.6 billion a year more in real terms than it was in 1999-2000.

Unfair funding: The Government's system of resource allocation means that the areas with most demand on their health services no longer receive the most money. Until Labour came to power, NHS resources were allocated to areas in a way that secured 'equal opportunity of access to healthcare'. However, the Treasury has specifically added an element to the allocation formula which aims to tackle health inequalities, meaning that some areas with a low disease burden, but deemed to be socially deprived, receive much more funding than areas deemed to be affluent but with a high burden of disease.