'End NHS Funding Protection' Says Liam Fox

National Health Service funding should not continue to be protected, according to the senior Tory and former Cabinet minister Liam Fox.

Dr Fox said the policy of simply pouring more money into the NHS had been "tested to destruction" and had failed to deliver improvements, leaving Britain lagging behind other countries on medical outcomes.

The former GP and shadow health secretary said the health service placed too much emphasis on chasing targets and on spending which was "killing patients", referring to the scandal at Mid Staffordshire.

And he hit out at the continuing culture of waste within the NHS, saying it was "easy to be generous with other people's money".

Dr Fox urged David Cameron not to include a pledge to increase funding for the NHS in real terms in the Conservative manifesto ahead of the general election as he had done in the run-up to the 2010 vote.

He said: "I think we've tested to destruction the idea that simply throwing lots more money at the health service will make it better.

"The increase over the last decade has been phenomenal and yet a lot of our health indicators lag behind other countries, particularly things like stroke outcome or a lot of cancer outcomes.

"We've become obsessed with throughput and not outcomes and that has been hugely to the detriment of the patients in our system.

"If you treat the National Health Service itself as being the important entity, and not the patients, then you're on a hiding to nothing."

He cautioned that ring-fencing the NHS budget was stopping other Government projects from getting adequate and vital funding.

And he highlighted the issue of waste, telling The Times: "Anybody who has worked with or around the NHS knows there is still a huge amount of waste associated with it.

"It is very easy to be generous with other people’s money. The trouble is, there's a finite amount of it."

Luciana Berger MP, Labour's Shadow Public Health Minister, said: "The NHS is starting 2014 with a crisis in England's A&E departments. It's a crisis of this Government's making and yet today a senior Tory thinks the answer is to cut the NHS's budget.

"David Cameron already broke his promise to protect NHS spending in his first year in Downing Street, wasted billions on a reorganisation that set back patient care, and has overseen a crisis in A&E. Today's intervention just reminds people why you cannot trust the Tories with the NHS."

Some Tory backbenchers have been angered by the policy of ring-fencing some department budgets while the rest of government has been hit by cuts.

NHS funding was £57bn in 2002 and will be £110.4bn in 2015-16, under Chancellor George Osborne's spending plans.