Professor Steve Thomas:

I will take up the second question on the national health fund. It is difficult and probably without precedent to get the current tax base to deliver sufficient resources for the scale of change required to transition the system and reconfigure it.

There is a strong case for making a one-off investment in reconfiguration. As we have seen, even though elements are included in the capital plan, important elements of the new system relating to primary and social care professionals are still lacking. The danger is that with tax, one will always get squeezed out. We have even seen the overrun issue having an effect so there will be a squeezing out. Yet there is no protection and there is no earmarking. It is difficult to protect the necessary space to do that. There probably needs to be a conversation with the public about the earmarking of particular tax into the fund and allocating from that for reconfiguration and entitlement expansion purposes, otherwise the danger will always be that it gets crowded out. However laudable the ambitions, the danger is that they will get crowded out by the immediate need.