£1bn NHS red tape bonfire so cash goes to frontline

Mr Lansley, who will publish the Government's White Paper on health reforms today, said: "Saving a billion pounds and getting it into the frontline really matters." As part of the shake-up, GPs will be given a far greater role in commissioning services for their patients.

Mr Lansley said that patients will be given more choice and control of their care. "In the last seven years bureaucracy in the National Health Service has doubled. I do need to cut back the bureaucracy, of course we do.

"People in the NHS they know that there is this waste of bureaucracy and the target culture. Saving a billion pounds and getting it into the frontline really matters."

He said the changes would give patients greater freedom without choices being taken away by "unaccountable bureaucracy".

"The principles are very straight forward – firstly, patients should exercise more control over their healthcare. Decisions should only be made about us, with us and no decisions about us, without us.

"The second principle is the people we trust, we trust the doctors and nurses, GPs, hospital consultants, hospital nurses, we trust them in matters of life and death. Shouldn't we actually expect that at the same time they have responsibility for making decisions about our care?

"The third thing is let's get rid of this tick box target culture and the bureaucracy that goes with it, let's focus on the outcomes.

"When I publish the White Paper...we are going to focus on empowering those institutions in the NHS that actually can deliver. There is a thing called

practice-based commissioning consortia – GPs working together – they just don't have the power, the primary care trust has the power.

"We are going to make it clear that independent sector providers can offer services to the NHS if they meet the high quality care we are looking for and within NHS prices."

Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham said the proposals made him "want to weep" because of the chaos another reorganisation would cause.

He said it was "rubbish" to say that the NHS had become bloated with bureaucracy.

"We took the NHS from its malnourished state where it was underfunded compared to the EU average per head of spending and we increased it...because we then delivered a health service that was providing a decent standard of care to all people in this country."