Laurence Buckman, GP negotiator 'They have promised much and done little. You do not build policy in a vacuum - you start from where people are - so it is not surprising a lot of their ideas have built on Conservative policy. But at times it has been difficult to tell the difference between them.

'You can pour in money for waiting list initiatives, but all you do is use up that cash.

We need to invest in the future. That means more hospitals and more doctors.'

Paddy Glackin, chair of the junior doctors' forum 'People have been disillusioned. With this government, presentation is everything and reality is nothing. It is the old Conservative regime - loyalty is all.

'I said I was going to emigrate if the Conservatives came in again. I was going to South Africa. Sometimes I wish they had won and I had gone.

'Labour has refused to put taxes up and because of that inflation has gone up. My mortgage has gone up by£1,000 a year. I wish that£1,000 had gone on tax, where it would do some good, instead of the banks and building societies.'

Gareth Richards, Essex GP 'Last year everybody was excited because they expected a change of policy. There has been no change of policy. The group I belong to has been anti-fundholding on principle.

Now we are being forced into fundholding through primary care groups. They have none of the incentives of the old scheme - and they come with a load of baggage to control our budgets and get rationing without the Treasury admitting it is going on.'

Chaand Nagpaul, West London GP 'I still feel very positive. I am leading a commissioning pilot built around the configuration of PCGs and it has proved people can work together. We have to remind ourselves what life was like under the internal market. GPs talk about rationing, but they had a bigger rationing role by being fundholders because rationing care was linked to the budget of a single GP. PCGs give us a corporate structure and rationing will not impact on any one GP.

'The deal with Milburn means we have an unprecedented opportunity to influence healthcare locally. We must seize it.'

Leslie Cantlay, consultant psychiatrist, Cleveland 'What do I think of the Labour government? Do we have one? It is certainly not Labour as we understood it in the 1960s.

'GPs are depressed, but it is hard to say whether that is because of the government or because they are having more change imposed on them. From the hospital side, we are getting rid of the purchaser-provider split and that has to be good.'

Derek Machin, consultant urologist, Liverpool 'The worst thing is they are perpetuating a fraud on the general public because they are not going to spend more on the health service. They are talking about several billion pounds over several years and that is probably what the Conservatives would have done. It makes for good PR but nothing else.

'We needed another reform of general practice like a hole in the head. . .PCGs will be too big to work on a fundholding basis and too small to function like the old health authorities.

'If you wanted the worst of all possible worlds you might just come up with this - and it is going to cost money. Every reform of the NHS does.'

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