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NHS Deficits

I am afraid that I must conclude, because I have taken too much time. I should like to do justice to some of the points that have been made in our debate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley asked about planning for surplus. It is obviously better to plan for surplus than to plan for break-even and just miss, but we will soon provide more details about the issue that he raised—giving people incentives to carry over budgets from one year to the next—and I hope that he will be reassured when we do so. I have taken more time than I planned, but it is important that I deal with a couple of points that several Opposition Members made. Many hon. Members raised the funding formula, and sought—I believe—to attribute problems in some parts of the country to the issue. On several occasions, that conclusion was ascribed to the chief economist in his evidence to the Health Committee, but he did nothing of the sort. Indeed, backing up the Department’s view, he said that there is no single simple cause of deficits in the health service, nor is there any single simple way of dealing with them. As for the question of the funding formula, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire and his hon. Friends asked why we should have proxies for health care need, and suggested we use direct measures of health care need measures such as age, but why is age anything other—