NHS (60th Anniversary)

I shall now inveigh against a slight conspiracy between Conservative and Labour Front Benchers. It suits both sides to say that the Government invented national targets for waiting times in 1997. That is untrue—they were invented by Virginia Bottomley before I became Secretary of State. Waiting times were reducing well before I became Secretary of State. They continued to decrease during my time in post and reduced further after 1997 as a result of national waiting time targets. The point that my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire makes about national targets, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that they were introduced in the early 1990s to tackle precisely the problem to which the Under-Secretary referred. They were effective before 1997 and became more effective afterwards, but the commitment to national targets has now become obsessive, distorting the use of resources.