ABSTRACT
Consensus yielded to confrontation when Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health in the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, published his plans for the service in July 2010. The White Paper, Equity and Excellence: liberating the National Health Service (NHS), prompted a conflict that was almost as bitter as that provoked by Mrs Thatcher’s 1989 proposals and lasted even longer. In the post-1948 history of the NHS, the Lansley proposals – forged during his long years as the Conservative Party’s spokesman on health policy – were unprecedented in the scope and scale of their ambitions. Many of the commitments, such as those to extending patient choice and greater visibility for the NHS’s activities, represented developments of existing policies. An independent NHS board was to allocate resources and provide commissioning guidelines, while Monitor was to develop into an economic regulator to oversee aspects of access, competition and price-setting.
