[Image: Daily Mirror.]

Health chiefs now waste almost £62 million a year bidding for tenders or assessing whether they should make a bid, new figures reveal.

This is exactly the kind of waste that some of us predicted before the Health and Social Care Act was passed in 2012.

For example, the unused statement by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in January 2012, as follows: “The academy and medical royal colleges are not able to support the bill as it currently stands.

“Unless the proposals are modified the academy believes the bill may widen rather than lessen health inequalities and that unnecessary competition will undermine the provision of high quality integrated care to patients.”

Ministers led by then-Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, along with senior officials, telephoned the presidents of the colleges ahead of its release, asking them to reconsider, and in effect forced the statement’s withdrawal. However, its existence shows that there was dissent against the Conservative-led plans for the NHS – on exactly the lines laid out in the Mirror article, before the Act was passed.

Read the rest of the Mirror article on the newspaper’s website.

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