Ending wasteful administration of NHS is key to saving it

JOHN Redwood MP provided such an illuminating insight in to how the Conservative Party is planning to improve the NHS (Yorkshire Post, April 7) by reducing bureaucratic waste and introducing efficiency.

Funds saved by cutting layer upon layer of administration, initiated by the Labour government during 13 irresponsible years, could be used wisely to increase the medical staff and equipment, benefiting patients by raising standards to a level enjoyed in Europe.

In contrast, the next day we were presented with an appalling letter from Tom Howley (Yorkshire Post, April 8), with the ridiculous statement that the new coalition Government was a partnership of two unelected political bodies bringing reform to the NHS that nobody understood or wanted.

This is preposterous. The country rejected the failed Labour government for wrecking the economy, which made them unelectable.

Then people voted to offer the Conservatives and Lib Dems a rare opportunity to co-operate and put the UK back on a sound footing. This included reorganising the NHS, as set out in six pages of the Conservative manifesto.

When canvassing in the General Election, I knocked on doors and talked to electors. On four separate days in different locations within the Shipley constituency, I encountered four NHS managers, of whom three were retired and the other still working. All of them volunteered the same independent comment; that they were fully aware of massive waste within the NHS through their careers.

Stunningly all four were voting Conservative in the expectation that a Tory government would end the expanding waste of funds encouraged by the Labour administration. It was imperative that the NHS was redirected away from central interference or it would crash.

From: Paul Nightingale, Howden, East Yorkshire.

BETTY Marsden is correct in saying that Britain, along with most of Europe, was virtually bankrupt after the war (Yorkshire Post, April 11) and that the US, wanting to prevent a repeat of the Treaty of Versailles – which historians now agree led indirectly to the Second World War – poured enormous resources into Europe.

However, while Germany invested in the wirtschaftswunder – the economic miracle – we in Britain used the money to create the NHS and support the introduction of National Service.

So instead of investing in the future, the politicians of the day spawned a monster of a health service, which this Government is now desperately trying to rein back ,and also took every able bodied young man out of the employment market, just when they were needed to rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure, so we could carry on pretending to be a big player on a world stage that even then was being dominated by the Americans and the Soviets.