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This is great analysis; particularly the comparison of what Lansley and Nicholson say and do. They both appear to suffer Jekyll and Hyde moments, well at least when they appear in front of the Select Committee. If my name were Dorrell, I'd be dragging them back and asking: why are there two plans, and why did you misinform a parliamentary committee?

Shall we sum up the changes so far:

- There is a growing struggle to find anyone with credibility supporting the bill
- The implementation plan (Nicholson challenge) is a completely different set of plans that are secret or worse there is no plan to save £20bn (put back a year)
- The change will cost £2bn which is the same as the total annual cost of PCTs and SHAs
- SHAs are planning on strikes happening later this year
- The NHS will be 18% privately run and delivered, when consortia are in place
- So profound are the concerns about consortia capability the plan is to transfer as many SHA and PCT staff to them
- Lansley lied about top down reorganisation but we are asked to trust him this time
- Every service change Lanlsey stopped has subsequently been approved (last one will go through shortly)
- Despite the headline that the NHS budget is ring fenced it is not (see inflation 3.7%) and job cuts in providers will be in their many thousands. Provider savings are bailing out the failure in the SHA/PCT reorganisation (Lansley's plan). Had Lansley reduced PCTs by half, closed SHA, the cuts would have been delivered earlier, at less cost and the risk to patients would much less.

Tell me why we let politicians directly manage our biggest and most important services (health and education) when they have not even had relevant work experience training.

Tell me why the spineless administrators in DH just comply with every political whim.