Faith in health service will be sorely tested if its billions disappear into executives’ pockets

What can we really expect from an extra £12 billion a year for the NHS: shorter waiting lists, or a Ferrari on the driveway of senior NHS executives? I would love to believe it will be the former, but I fear it will be the latter. It has emerged that the NHS is to hire 42 executives to run the new integrated care boards, each of whom will be earning up to £270,000 a year.

We have been here before. Two decades ago, Gordon Brown announced proudly that he would increase NHS spending to reach the average healthcare spend per person in European countries. The following year GPS enjoyed a huge boost to their pay as a result of a botched contract that offered them extra money for doing things that many were already routinely doing.

By all means spend more money to reduce the list of 5.6 million people waiting for an operation or some other procedure. But don’t brag about spending an extra £12 billion a year on the NHS without setting a clear plan for how the money will be spent, or without first looking to see whether some money to cut waiting lists can be found from efficiency gains elsewhere.

Why, for example, are we persisting with a test and trace system which has been allocated £38 billion and which, according to government advisers, has made marginal difference to infection numbers?

The Government seems to work on the assumption that we are all as a nation so besotted with the NHS that we will neither notice nor care about poor spending decisions. Sorry, but we do. And it grates to see extra billions going into the NHS when in many ways it is becoming less accessible.

I have always been a supporter of the NHS, and the last thing I would want is a Us-style insurance-based system where millions fall through the net. Neither do I resent paying taxes, within reason. But I did find my support wavering somewhat three years ago when I was initially refused a hernia operation – a pretty simple procedure which my father and grandfather had done on the NHS at the same age without any fuss.

Lord Lawson once described the NHS as the closest thing the English have to a religion. I know what he meant, but he wasn’t quite right. Many of us are pretty agnostic, and we will pretty quickly lose our faith if we see the extra NHS billions disappearing into senior executives’ pockets while waiting lists remain stubbornly long.