For its first 8 months of life the Government was silent on whether there were any financial problems in the NHS at all. Whenever they mentioned it at all they claimed that since they were putting extra money into the NHS and cutting everything else, the NHS was “safe in their hands”.

Then in December, when their proposed reforms hit a crisis caused by the NHS not having a major problem that their proposals were designed to address (and when  MORI had just recorded the highest of satisfaction levels with the NHS), they started to argue that there was in fact a long term necessity to improve value for money in the NHS – and that this was their core rationale for the reform.