One of the outcomes of the Government’s June 2011 reform of its July 2010 NHS reforms has been the increased centralisation of Government control. As I will explore later in the week, the first set of reforms that was intended – in the heady days of July 2010 – to liberate the NHS and localise decision making is now set to provide much more national centralisation of commissioning than has ever previously existed.

A measure of Government incompetence can be seen in the scale of the defeat of its original intention to liberate the NHS and provide local control. From April 2013 the starting point for many of these reforms will be that much more health care is being commissioned by a national organisation called the NHS Commissioning Board than ever before. People all over the country will have had their local PCT abolished and seen it replaced by this national organisation now responsible for commissioning their care.