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Dear Mr McLellan,

As Chairman of The Community Voice, an umbrella organisation concerned exclusively to promote the patients' voice in NHS services, I received from a member, Prof. Mervyn Stone, the following comment on the Asthana article in this week's HSJ, which I think I should share with you.

“The Asthana piece deserves welcome as a closely reasoned antidote to the “predictable outrage” that permeates media comment on Lansley’s speech. But the antidote will work only if it is read carefully. Its author may well be the only commentator with proven understanding of both the complex financial instrument that, without any rational justification, dictates large per capita funding differences - and someone who has identified blatant political manipulations of its structure. It is by now fairly obvious that the formula is being judged by its outcomes (does it look right?) - by both policy-makers and commentators. In effect, the huge, pretentious formula has been a chimera distracting from the need for a different sort of “number-crunching”. Mr Lansley is suggesting that ACRA is doing that, and that we should all wait to see what will be done for CCGs. Instead of holding our breath, however, why not use the breather to read the Asthana piece again and, if there are bits we don’t really understand, look at the piece ‘Formulas at War’ in the Statistics Corner of the Civitas Institute’s home-page?”

Yours sincerely,

Joan Davis