Tag: coalition

Osborne set to borrow billions more than Darling was projected to

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We know from this morning’s unemployment figures that the government’s austerity programme is hurting – and it’s hurting the young and unemployed the most. But is it working?

David Cameron and Nick Clegg asserted in the Coalition Agreement (pdf) that tackling public sector debt was the government’s ‘most urgent task’. It has been revealed this morning that across the finance industry, the verdict is failure.

The Treasury has collated 14 independent forecasters’ predictions (pdf, p.18) for net government borrowing over the next four years.

Their collected view is that chancellor George Osborne will borrow billions more than the Office of Budget Responsibility predicted he would in June 2010 (pdf, Table C7, p.90) – or that the OBR said Alistair Darling (pdf, Table 4.5, p.38) would have if Labour had been re-elected.

Graph-of-borrowing-projections-2010-2015

Here are the raw figures:

Table-of-borrowing-projections-2010-2015

At worst, the government’s swinging cuts have stopped the recovery in its tracks, leading to borrowing far above and beyond what they predicted their supposedly profligate rivals intended. At best, with the European and global economy facing such turmoil, the facts have significantly changed since the general election of May 2010.

The current strategy has failed. It’s time for serious change.

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/11/george-osborne-set-to-borrow-billions-more-than-alistair-darling-was-projected-to/

NHS cancer figures contradict David Cameron and Andrew Lansley’s claims

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The prime minister and health secretary have criticised the NHS on cancer, but new figures suggest the service is a world leader

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Denis Campbell, health correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 18.48 GMT
Article history

Andrew Lansley and David Cameron, who have used criticisms of the NHS record on cancer to justify a planned shakeup. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/PA
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley’s repeated criticisms of the NHS’s record on cancer have been contradicted by new research that shows the health service to be an international leader in tackling the disease.

The findings challenge the government’s claims that NHS failings on cancer contribute to 5,000-10,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year, which ministers have used as a key reason for pushing through their radical shakeup of the service.

In fact, the NHS in England and Wales has helped achieve the biggest drop in cancer deaths and displayed the most efficient use of resources among 10 leading countries worldwide, according to the study published in the British Journal of Cancer.

“These results challenge the feeble justification of the government’s changes, which appear to be based upon overhyped media representation, rather than hard comparable evidence. This paper should be a real boost to cancer patients and their families because the NHS’s performance on cancer is much better than the media presents. It challenges the government’s assertion that the NHS is inefficient and ineffective at treating cancer – an argument for reforming the NHS,” said Prof Colin Pritchard, a health academic at Bournemouth University.

He co-wrote the research with Dr Tamas Hickish, a consultant medical oncologist at Poole and Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch hospitals in Dorset.

The research shows that ministers have misrepresented the NHS’s record on cancer in order to gain support for their unpopular shakeup, said Pritchard.

The prime minister and the health secretary have said that both survival and death rates from the disease in Britain are low by international standards. Cameron, for example, claimed during last year’s general election campaign that Britain had a higher rate of cancer deaths than Bulgaria.

The authors studied cancer mortality and the amount of GDP spent on healthcare between 1979 and 2006 in England and Wales and nine other countries, including Germany, the US, Spain, Japan and France.

While cancer deaths fell everywhere, England and Wales saw the biggest drop in mortality among males aged 15-74 – down 31%. While six countries saw falls of at least 20%, England and Wales – which in 1979-81 had the third highest rate with 4,156 deaths per million men – improved the most, achieving the fifth lowest rate among the 10 countries by 2004-06 with 2,869 deaths per million. Among men aged 55-64 and 65-74, who are more likely to get cancer, mortality dropped by 35% and 28%.

While mortality among women the same age declined by less, at 19%, that was the third biggest improvement after Japan (23%) and Germany (20%).

And the NHS was the most efficient of the 10 countries at reducing cancer mortality ratios once the proportions of GDP spent on healthcare were compared, the study found. While England and Wales spent less on health than most others, they achieved the biggest overall annual fall in cancer mortality over the 27-year period, of 900 deaths per million. Once average GDP spending on healthcare was compared, the NHS saw the biggest fall in male and female cancer deaths of an extra 119 lives a year per 1% of GDP spent, ahead of the Netherlands (74) and almost double that in Germany (68), France (67) and Japan (60).

“That shows how good England and Wales are on cancer care, relative to spend. We do significantly more with proportionately less. It means that 34,484 people are alive today that wouldn’t have been if things had not improved since 1980,” said Pritchard.

Two authoritative studies have concluded that cancer survival rates in the UK have lagged behind those in comparable major developed countries, though experts dispute which indicators give the most accurate picture of Britain’s cancer performance. For example, Prof John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund health thinktank, published research in the British Medical Journal earlier this year which disputed the portrayal of Britain as “the sick man of Europe” and argued that cancer survival rates had been improving, significantly in the case of breast cancer.

Duleep Allirajah, policy manager at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “In the past 10 years cancer services in the UK have improved dramatically. Waiting times have decreased and services have been modernised.” But, with cancer survival improving, the NHS now has to address new challenges, notably improving care for patients who have undergone treatment.

“Far too many people in the UK still experience sometimes serious problems related to their cancer treatment. For many these can persist up to 10 years after treatment. The focus now must be for the government and the NHS to address the issues of aftercare and making sure cancer is treated as a long term condition,” said Allirajah.

Pritchard said: “David Cameron and Andrew Lansley are happier with NHS ‘bad news’ stories rather than, as our research shows, that we should celebrate the NHS which, in monetary terms, is vastly superior to the private healthcare system of the USA.

“Of course we should always be looking to improve. But the only way to judge the NHS is to compare it with other countries, which shows that we are still getting the NHS on the comparative cheap.”

The Department of Health declined to respond directly to Pritchard and Hickish’s findings. “There is a difference between achieving efficiency and the results patients receive. While it is good that NHS cancer treatment is relatively efficient, we know that the results patients actually get lag behind many other countries,” said a spokesman.

“Our cancer strategy is clear – we aim to save 5,000 lives extra every year by 2015 which will bring us up to the level achieved in many other comparable countries. We owe it to patients to deliver standards which are up there with the best in the world,” he added.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/07/nhs-cancer-figures-cameron-lansley

We’re all in this together…..

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Latest survey of boardroom pay finds average compensation went up by 49% to £2.7m The Guardian, Friday 28 October 2011 Chief executives’ pay rose on average by 43.5%, finance directors’ by 34.1%, and all other directors by 66.5%, according to the latest IDS survey. Photograph: Photodisc Total earnings for directors of FTSE 100 companies increased […]

FactCheck: Is Lansley misleading us over the NHS?

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The claim

“This meeting deplores the government’s misleading and inaccurate talking down of health outcomes in the UK in order to justify its White Paper reforms and Health Bill in England.”

British Medical Association (BMA) Special Representative Meeting to debate NHS reforms in England, Motion 10, March 15, 2011

By Emma Thelwell

The background

Doctors charged the Government today with feeding the public “deliberate unashamed misinformation” in its bid to push through radical NHS reforms.

Almost 400 doctors gathered at the BMA’s first emergency meeting in almost 20 years to vote against the Health and Social Care Bill – and to vote on three separate motions of no confidence in Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

Mr Lansley, who lost the support of his Coalition partners over the weekend at the Lib Dem conference, has insisted that patients are at the heart of the reforms.  He argues that the NHS needs reform on the basis that it lags behind Europe, specifically with poor death rates in cancer and heart disease.

But is the NHS really the sick man of Europe? FactCheck investigates.

The analysis

The whole of Europe “could do better” in the health care stakes, according to latest analysis from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

While no one’s been issued a clean bill of health, the OECD’s summary of the UK’s battle against cancer and heart disease isn’t all bad.

Take breast cancer. It’s the most common form of cancer among all women in all EU countries – accounting for 31 per cent of cancer incidence and 17 per cent of cancer deaths among women in 2008.

The UK screens more women for breast and cervical cancer than most other developed countries and in the OECD’s 2010 Health at a Glance, we ranked third for cervical cancer screening and fifth for mammography screening over the period 2000 to 2008.

Survival rates, however, are less healthy. For both cancers, the UK dips below the European average – the 5-year survival rate for cervical cancer during 2002-2007 was 59.4 per cent – versus an OECD average of 65.7 per cent; and for breast cancer the rate was 78.5 per cent, slightly lower than the OECD average of 81.2 per cent.

But, the OECD points out that survival rates for different types of cancer is improving in the UK.

And data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) rubber-stamps this; with latest figures showing that the UK survival rate for most of the 21 common cancers improved – for both men and women – over the period 2003-2007 compared with the period 2001-2006.

Furthermore, ONS stats show that the five-year survival rate for women diagnosed with breast cancer during 2003-2007 was 83.3 per cent. This was 1.3 per cent higher than for women diagnosed in 2001-2006

As for heart disease, the official Ministerial briefing for the Bill claimed that, despite matching the French for healthcare spending, our rate of death from heart disease is double theirs.

This claim was repudiated a few months ago by the Kings Fund’s chief economist John Appleby. He said the comparison was made over just one year of OECD figures, and with France – a country with the lowest death rate for “myocardial infarction” – or heart attacks – in Europe.

Mr Appleby pointed out: “Not only has the UK the largest fall in death rates from myocardial infarction between 1980 and 2006 of any European country, if trends over the past 30 years continue, it will have a lower death rate than France as soon as 2012.”

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-is-lansley-misleading-us-over-the-nhs/5993

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the GP representing Edgware and Hendon at today’s BMA meeting, tabled the first motion against Mr Lansley. Dr Nagpaul could not accept  what he called the Government’s “plain ignorance” on the NHS’s record.

“Did they really not know that heart disease mortality has fallen more sharply in the UK than any other European nation…Did they really not know that the UK leads Europe in the reduction of breast cancer mortality rates, and that lung cancer death rates in men is actually lower than those in France?,” he said.

The verdict

Since kicking off his case for the “liberation” of the NHS in July, Mr Lansley has repeatedly claimed that “compared to other countries” the NHS has achieved poor outcomes in some areas.

But as he stated himself, the notably poor performances are in areas such as diabetes and asthma – confirmed to FactCheck by the OECD.

The OECD does say that most other European countries achieve higher survival rates for different types of cancer.

Yet, it also acknowledges that our cancer survival rates have improved. Plus, the organisation also tipped its hat to the UK for having a lower number of hospital admissions for congestive heart failure and hypertension than the rest of Europe.

Dr Nagpaul accused the Government of being “so bereft of national pride” that it totally ignores such facts, as well as the findings of the Commonwealth Fund.

FactCheck however, won’t be falling foul to that charge – we’ve read the 2010 Health Policy survey by the US health think tank, which pits the UK against Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the US.

The UK scored highest on confidence in NHS treatment and second only to New Zealand on the quality of care from doctors – with 79 per cent of those questioned rating the care they’d received in the past 12 months from their doctor as very good or excellent.

The NHS isn’t a picture of health, but we’re hardly the worst in Europe. So why is Mr Lansley being such a hypochondriac?