A child from the bottom-decile income group was twice as likely as a child from the top group to die before the age of 15. The study blamed these trends on income inequalities, which, it claimed, had accelerated during the 1980s at a rate not matched by any other rich country. Another area in which little progress has been made is preventative medicine. But complaints that the government wanted to tell people what to eat soon led to ministerial indigestion. An official report on obesity was suppressed by the Department of Health, which also decided to abolish its own advisory committee on nutrition.
Officials now accept that there is no hope of meeting the government's target for reducing obesity.
One frequent complaint from opposition spokesmen and other critics is the high cost of administering the new-fangled structures of the NHS . Meanwhile, many medical services appear to have been cut savagely. Since 1979 one in five hospitals has closed and one in three hospital beds has gone. But things are not quite what they seem. Large numbers of small hospitals have been replaced by smaller numbers of large ones.