Axe Trident to fund NHS - Milburn

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Ex-Health Secretary Alan Milburn has urged Gordon Brown to scrap Trident and ID cards to prevent cuts to the NHS.

"They may have been priorities in times of plenty. In times of want they are not," he told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Brighton.

Mr Milburn said he did not think the NHS should be "exempt" from the savings set out by the prime minister.

And he warned that without fundamental reform the health service's long-term survival could be in doubt.

In what is likely to be his final appearance at a Labour conference as an MP, Mr Milburn, who is standing down at the next election, said the entire culture of the health service had to change.

That meant devolving power from the centre, abolishing Strategic Health Authorities and handing over Primary Care Trusts to local authority control.

'Quality'

He also urged the government to press ahead with the Foundation Hospital programme saying every hospital in the country should have Trust status.

He also called for more use of private contractors - saying he disagreed with current Health Secretary Andy Burnham who has said priority will always be given to in-house NHS services, saying "quality should be the only yardstick".

Health Minister Mike O'Brien told the Smith Institute fringe meeting the government was committed to pushing ahead with Foundation Trusts. But he said but some of the hospitals which wanted Trust status were not providing high enough standards of care, and he was concerned that events at the Mid Staffordshire Trust earlier this year had damaged the Trust "brand".

He said he had written last week to the chief executives of the top 20 Foundation Hospitals asking if they would be willing to mentor or even take over underperforming hospitals bidding for Trust status to help them meet the required standards. Money could be made available from existing budgets, he added after the meeting.

He said Strategic Health Authorities had to "increasingly justify their role within the NHS", saying the government had said to them "if you want to stay you have got to justify being there".