Back then, the surge in resources was at least accompanied by a major report on healthcare reform, based on a review of the future of the NHS by a former National Westminster Bank chief executive, Derek Wanless.
Not much of it ever came to fruition, and what did survive the NHS’s myriad vested interests did little or no good. But we’ve not yet even seen a plan this time around.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, talks a good game, but where’s the beef? All he’s done so far is set out a fluffy series of objectives and sought a “national conversation” on reform.
The history of granting the NHS big increases in funding before deciding how the money should be spent is not encouraging.
Some kind of argument can be made, I suppose, that merely reducing the backlog of waiting times improves the economy’s supply, with more people released into the workforce. But it’s a slender argument on which to bet the farm.
Healthcare is a leviathan where ageing demographics combine mercilessly with rising expectations to create insatiable demand which a taxpayer-funded service can never hope to meet.
It doesn’t matter how much money the Government throws at “our precious” NHS, the sense of perma-crisis requiring ever more money to be thrown at it will never go away.
But it is not just the unresolved challenges of British healthcare that bond investors worry about.
The wider concern is just how little the extra £70bn a year in tax and borrowing actually buys.
By the year after next, it is all largely used up, leaving the spending profile for the rest of the parliament exceptionally tight. This looks politically unrealistic, to put it mildly.
Some of the more immediate spending plans seem equally implausible. For instance, does anyone honestly believe there will be no increase at all in defence spending next year? That’s the Treasury’s working assumption.
Likewise, the Home Office, where steep cuts in departmental spending are assumed, predicated on the delusional belief that the Government is going to miraculously solve the small boats problem.