- Sat Jan 10, 2026 11:46 am
#103330
What's Andrew Fisher talking about? Taxes and borrowing have been raised to pay for the extra spending across the board. And digital ID ought to help make efficiency savings, so it's investment spending in that sense. Anybody can pick out two items, one they like and one they don't, and say that spending on the first one has been cut to pay for the second.
I had a thing from the NHS about bowel cancer screening, which I'm going to have. One thing that caught my eye was that they said they didn't have my bowel cancer records. (I hope that's for the good reason that they don't exist), but it's pretty ridiculous. Someone is going to have their time wasted asking me about stuff that ought to be to hand.
It's a shame the Blair era attempt at NHS IT reform didn't succeed like it might have done. It wasn't quite the £10bn disaster if you read the NAO reports on it. The last one reckoned that it actually just about covered its costs in terms of benefits. Perhaps we could have been honest about that, and something might have got done by now. When I say "we", I obviously mean David Cameron and Nick Clegg, who preferred to have a "Labour grand IT projects waste while they neglected the basics" line.